Small among winged creatures is the bee
but her produce is the sweetest of the sweet.
-Ecclesiasticus 11
“Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.”
It All Starts with Bees & Flowers
"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best - "and then he had to stop and think.
Because although eating honey is a very good thing to do, there was a
moment just before you began to eat it which was better than
when you were, but he didn't know what it was called"
- Winnie the Pooh quotes
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This is a carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica).
Carpenter bees look a bit scary - they're big and create a loud ominous buzz.
Although fiercely protective of their female bee mate, have no fear -
Carpenter bee males have no stinger and can't stick you.
Carpenter bees have an almost entirely black back, unlike bumblebees
(Bombus ssp) whose backs have yellow stripes and are hairy:
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| Scroll down for link to recipes. |
