Bees and their work.

Bees are wonderful creatures but they can sting. People are afraid of bees because the sting of a honey bee can hurt very badly.

Bees fly from flower to flower when the sun shines. You will not find a bee in a garden at night or on a rainy day.

A bee has a stinger on each side of its body. The stinger is like a spear and it shoots from the insect’s back. Each stinger has nine points containing poison. In most bees this poison is mild but a swarm of angry bees can even kill.

When a bee’s poisonous spear enters a person’s flesh, it holds it fast. Then its two halves slide up and down on each other like a little pump and send the poison in. however, when the bee tries to pull away, the stinger breaks and the bee dies.

Bees have two pairs of wings, these are set so close together that they almost touch. When the bee flies the rear wings open out and fix themselves on the rear edge of the front wings.

A bee is like a tiny aeroplane; and like the aeroplane it carries cargo with it as it flies. It has a tiny tank inside its body to carry nectar from the flower which is made into honey. The bee sucks the nectar from the flower through a long tube. On its hind legs are two baskets to carry pollen, the flower dust which you see inside flowers. The nectar in the bees is like petrol which makes a car run or an areoplane fly.

The body of a bee is covered with hairs for gathering pollen. When the bee dives into a flower and roils about in it, the pollen grains stick to the hairs on its body. Even the bee’s eyes collect pollen, for hairs grow out of its eyeballs. And the bee has a comb and a special soft brush to remove the pollen that has stuck to its back.

As the bee combs out the pollen, it moistens it with speak of honey and presses it into the pollen baskets on its rear legs.

Then it flies homeward to its hive with its sweet treasure.