Good morning. This is Bob Bragg. Welcome to the May 21st edition of Farm News and Views.
Did you celebrate World Bee Day yesterday? I did, and I read some interesting statistics about bees that I’ll share. World wide there are over 20,000 species of bees, including about 4,000 species of Native bees in North America that are found where ever flowers bloom. Bees are estimated to pollinate 170,000 species of plants worldwide, so the common expression “busy as a bee” isn’t just a misnomer. It was once believed that honey bees didn’t exist in North America before Europeans brought them to Virginia in 1622. But a 2009 discovery of a 14 million year old fossil of an extinct honey bee in west-central Nevada proved that honey bees had lived in North America in the distant past. In the west, according to records, the first honey bees arrived in Utah about 1850, and came to Colorado in 1863. Although honey bee Queens often live for three or four years, worker bees live for a few weeks in the summer, and a few months while in the hive during winter. One worker bee will produce about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey during its lifetime in the summer.
