Facts About Bees You May Not Have Known
Bees are fascinating creatures but definitely not ones you want swarming around your property this summer. They also have tremendous ecological benefits helpful in pollinating plants and flowers and allowing the world to grow. Mysterious and useful, these are some facts about bees you may not have heard before. It’s the kind of knowledge the Tampa pest control experts at Apex have amassed with decades of experience.
For starters, there are 16,000 types of bees. Not quite enough to fill up the Amalie Arena for a Lightning game but still an astonishing ecological variation. In nearly every subspecies, they divide themselves into a very specific hierarchy: drones live only to mate the queen (and are stingerless), workers who exist to collect pollen and attend to the queen, and, of course, the singular queen bee.
The human/bee relationship also has been interesting over the years. Of course, bees are used on an industrial scale in modern times for crop pollination, the collapse of many such industrial colonies has been widely confused as a collapse in wild bee populations, who are, in fact, doing generally well. But there have also been more esoteric uses of bees, such as a project at Los Alamos National Laboratory that tried to use bees’ unique sensory abilities to sniff out bombs. Dubbed the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, it actually worked, but the bees, once trained, don’t live that long, and some individual bees seemed better at the task than others. In short, no one has figured out how to usefully deploy these bomb-sniffing bees quite yet. During World War I, honey was often used to treat wounds because of its ability to absorb moisture. That still works, by the way, but we wouldn’t recommend trying it.
But bees are plenty remarkable without human intervention. They can flap their four wings at a rate of 11,400 strokes per minute and fly at nearly 15 miles per hour. The honey they create never spoils. And the next time you discount bees as mindless insects, think of this: biologists in Australia have discovered that bees can, in fact, recognize unique individual human faces.
Pretty unbeelievable. If you have any questions about bees that are on your property, or just want to further your knowledge of insects, feel free to continue browsing our blogs. And for more information on removal of bee hives, always think to contact the professionals in Tampa pest control at Apex at 877-459-2847.
