Bees and Butterflies

 There are three kinds of bees in a hive: Queen, Worker and Drone.

 Only the Queen in the hive lays eggs. She communicates with her hive with her own special scent called pheromones. The queen will lay around 1,500 eggs per day.

 Most caterpillars are plant eaters (herbivores).

 The average worker bee makes about 1/12 th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

 A beehive in summer can have as many as 50,000 to 80,000 bees. A bee must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey. It requires 556 worker bees to gather a pound of honey. Bees fly more than once around the world to gather a pound of honey.

 Bees have straw-like tongues called a proboscis so they can suck up liquids and also mandibles so they can chew.

Bees are the only insect in the world that make food for humans.

 The worker bees are all female and they do all the work for the hive. Workers perform the following tasks inside the hive as a House Bee: Cleaning, feeding the baby bees, feeding and taking care of the queen, packing pollen and nectar into cells, capping cells, building and repairing honeycombs, fanning to cool the hive and guarding the hive.

 Butterflies are insects

 A butterfly’s lifecycle is made up of four parts, egg, larva (caterpillars), pupa (chrysalis) and adult.

 Bees have two stomachs - one stomach for eating and the other special stomach is for storing nectar collected from flowers or water so that they can carry it back to their hive.

 Butterflies attach their eggs to leaves with a special glue

 An adult butterfly will eventually emerge from the chrysalis where it will wait a few hours for its wings to fill with blood and dry, before flying for the first time.

 Fully grown caterpillars attach themselves to a suitable twig or leaf before shedding their outside layer of skin to reveal a hard skin underneath known as a chrysalis.

 The bees use their honeycomb cells to raise their babies in, and to store nectar, honey, pollen and water.

 The male bees in the hive are called drones. Their job in the hive is to find a queen to mate with. Male bees fly out and meet in special drone congregation areas where they hope to meet a queen. Male drone bees don't have a stinger.

 Bees go through four stages of development: Egg, Larvae, Pupae and Adult Bee.

 A single beehive can make more than 100 pounds (45 kg) of extra honey. The beekeeper only harvests the extra honey made by the bees.

 Although bears do like honey, they prefer to eat the bee larvae because they are a good source of protein.

 Butterflies can live in the adult stage from anywhere between a week and a year, depending on the species.

 Butterflies have four wings.

 Most butterflies feed on nectar from flowers.

 If a worker bee uses her stinger, she will die.

Bees are classified as insects and they have six legs.

 Honey comes in different colors and flavors  The flower where the nectar was gathered from determines the flavor and color of the honey.

 Bees have five eyes - two compound eyes and three tiny ocelli eyes.

Scientists estimate that there are between 15000 and 20000 different species of butterfly.