AY Honors/Beekeeping/Answer Key
1. Know a brief history of keeping bees for honey.
Beekeeping is one of the oldest forms of food production. It was particularly well developed in Egypt and was discussed by the Roman writers Virgil, Gaius Julius Hyginus, Varro, and Columella. A pioneering beekeeping popularizer in the 19th century United States was Amos Root.
Traditionally, beekeeping was done for the bees' honey harvest, although nowadays crop pollination service can often provide a greater part of a commercial beekeeper's income.
Western honeybees are not native to the Americas. American, Australian, and New Zealand colonists imported honeybees from Europe, partly for honey and partly for their usefulness as pollinators. The first honeybee species imported were likely European dark bees. Later Italian bees, carniolan honeybees and caucasian bees were added.
2. List at least five uses of each of the following:
a. Honey
b. Beeswax
Beeswax is used commercially to make fine candles, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals including bone wax (cosmetics and pharmaceuticals account for 60% of total consumption), in polishing materials (particularly shoe polish), as a component of modelling waxes, and in a variety of other products. It is also used as a coating for cheese, to protect the food as it ages. While some cheesemakers have replaced it with plastic, many still use beeswax in order to avoid any unpleasant flavours that may result from plastic. Beeswax is also an ingredient in ''moustache wax, as well as dreadlock wax, and was used in the manufacturing of the cylinders used by the earliest phonographs.
c. Propolis
3. Name ten foods that would be very difficult to grow if there were no honey bees.
4. List the duties of the drone, the worker, and the queen bees.
5. Describe how bees build combs. Why does the comb turn dark with age?
6. What is meant by the following terms:
- a. Movable-frame hive
- b. Crossed comb
- c. Bee space
- d. Swarming
