Honeybees as a Resource essays

Honeybees as a Resource essays Honeybees as a Resource Honeybees are very useful to humans. As their name suggests, they make the sweet, delicious treat known as honey that we enjoy. They also make beeswax from which we make many useful items. But the most important thing bees do for us is to pollinate the plants. The honeybee visits flowers which secrete a sweet liquid called nectar. This water-like nectar is sipped from the blossoms by the bee and carried to the beehive. The raw nectar goes into the cells in almost the same condition as it was when the bee sipped it from the flowers. It is inside the hive that house bees evaporate the nectar down to the thick consistency which is what we know as commercial honey. We usually think of the main use of honey as a spread on bread, pancakes or biscuits. However, honey has a large use in cooking; such as pastries, canned foods, milk drinks, desserts, frostings, syrups, and salad dressings. Honey contains simple sugars and does not require digestion like regular sugar, so it is useful for quick energy pick up and even for diabetic people. Most honey is sold as extracted honey but it is also sold on the honeycomb which is the wax chambers the bees make in the hive in which to store the honey. The wax comes from a worker bee's belly when she is fourteen to twenty-one days old. The wax chambers are just big enough for a bee to crawl inside. Sometimes people like to eat honeycomb. It can be eaten on toast or as is; then the wax becomes like a chewing gum, but like chewing gum it should not be swallowed. In recent years a new process called the Dyce process has made it possible to make a very nice granulated honey called creamed honey which is gaining in popularity. However, granulated honey is not used much commercially because it is still an almost unknown honey product. Beeswax is the second most important product produced by the honeybees. Beeswax, the earliest of waxes, has been used in the f...