Tena Taylor, age 11, of Ringwood, Oklahoma, for her question:
Where do bees get wax to make their honeycombs?
In the world of the honeybees, the sunny season is the busy season. Through the warm afternoons, the birds may take siestas, the breezes may forget to puff and even the whispering leaves are silent. But the honeybees remain on the job, gathering pollen and nectar from the flowers. These basic groceries will be processed to make food for the teeming hive and some will be made into waxy combs to store the honey.
During a summer's day, a busy bee makes hundreds of trips to and from the hive. Each time she returns with the spiky baskets on her back legs bulging with golden pollen. She also returns with about one five thousandths of an ounce of sweet nectar, sucked from flower throats. This will be processed to make honey. Thousands of bees must make thousands of marketing trips to create one pound of honey.
Some of this honey will be reprocessed to make the waxy white cells in which it is stored. This job, as usual, is done by the busy worker bee. When new honeycombs are needed, she gorges and gorges herself on honey until she is fit to burst. Meantime, miraculous chemicals in her body change the gorged honey into waxy material.
On the underside of her furry abdomen, there are eight small pores arranged in two rows. When the waxy substance is prepared, it oozes out from these pores in tiny flakes. The next problem is to scrape the waxy flakes from her tummy. However, various tools for the job are conveniently attached to her legs. She uses the hard spikes that form the pollen baskets on flattened sections of her back legs. She also uses various spiky tools on her other legs.
At this point, her object is to get the waxy flakes off her abdomen and into her mouth. Chewing is necessary to make the stuff soft and moldable. When this is done, chances are she gets help from her sister workers. She carries her new made wax to where it is needed, which may be the building site for a new comb or the repairing of an old one.
There she spits out the chewed wax and gets ready to mold it in place. Other workers are on hand to help to press and tamp it into the proper six sided size and shape. Together they model another cell on a new honeycomb, or remodel the damaged one.
So, the honeycomb is made from re processed honey. But there are times when the honeybee hive needs something stronger than the usual honeycomb wax. This is in the late fall, when preparations are underway to make the hive weatherproof for the winter. This waxy material is called bee glue and the workers cannot make it from honey.
As usual, they depend on the plant world to provide all the things they need. In this case, the workers gather the various waxes and waxy resins that many plants create to protect themselves through the winter. The workers carry these gummy materials home and use them as bee glue to seal up the drafty cracks in the winter hive.