Honey Bees

Today we went to a apiary. We got to see a honeycomb and the bees were climbing all around on it. We learned how there are 3 diferant types of bees: Queen, Drone (male), and worker. The queen lives 1-2 years. The Drone lives until it mates then it dies and the worker only lives 5-7 weeks.

The way a queen larva is made is the worker feeds the larva royal jelly and that is what makes it a Queen. The workers make more then one so the first one that haches stings the other larva and kills them. The way you can tell a queen larva from the others is that it sticks out on the honeycomb and looks like a peanut.

The comb is made up of wax and honey. Larvae, honey and pollen are all stored in the comb which is shaped like a hexagon. The super, which stores the excess honey, is how the beekeepers get the honey so they do not disturb the larvae. The super is an extra box that is placed on top of the main hive. The hive has an opening at the bottom so that the bees can come and go and get pollen. We saw a showing box that had a comb in it so we could see how it looked.

When the beekeeper wants to get the honey they take a special knife and scrape off the top layer of wax which caps the honey. They do that on both sides. They place the frame into the extractor, which is like a large salad spinner, and use the crank that spins it which creates centrifugal force. There is a drain at the bottom. You pull the lid off and put the honey through a sieve and then you put it into a jar and sell it. 

We learned that there are lots of things that could go wrong such as a beetle infestation. They lay their larvae in the cells and destroy the honeycomb and honey. They can also be infested with ants, moths and another disease which cannot be cured so they have to burn the whole thing. :(

At the end we got to taste a flavored tube of honey. I tried blueberry and lemon but the lemon wasn't very good. We also bought a jar of honey. We learned that local raw honey is good for allergies. When we got home we tried apples dipped in honey.  

Bunny!

On Sunday we got a bunny. It is a Holland Lop. It's a male and his name is Peanut. He is grey and brown. His ears are grey and he has some grey on his side but he is mostly brown. The lady we bought him from called it "tort." My mom thinks it's short for "tortiseshell." He is a very sweet bunny and he only bit me once because he was supposed to be sleeping and I went to pick him up and he bit me because he wanted to sleep. That's when my mom told me they are nocturnal, which means sleep in the day and are up at night.

We've had him for a couple of days now and we are going to learn how to litter box train him. We gave him a water bottle and some strawberries and regular rabbit food. He peed on my mom's bed and nibbled on my mom's shoulder last night. We have to go to a feed store to buy the food because the lady gave us a little bag of food but we need more.

Penny is still very interested in having another animal in the house and she doesn't really know how to play nice with it. She is used to playing with dogs about her same size so she doesn't know how to act around this small animal. She sniffs him when I'm holding him or starts to play like she would play with her sister so we have to pick Peanut up.

Gecko

My brother found a gecko in our driveway. He was the cutest little thing I saw. He was cuter than a lizard. Timmy didn't name him but I would have named him Steve. He was smaller than a normal sized lizard and his feet were a little bit different. His skin color was lighter than a lizards. It was a misty-white color. Timmy put him in a jar and he looked up what they eat. We couldn't find it and so we went to where we thought a pet store was but it wasn't there so Timmy let him go. Unfortunately we didn't get a picture.

I learned that there are thousands of different types of geckos and that they don't have eyelids, but instead they have a transparent membrane that they lick to clean. We think this one was a juvenile Mediterranean house gecko.

Butterflies!

Both of our chrysalides have grown up into butterflies. The second one didn't want to leave the cage but the first one was happy to. We found out that if it has a black dot on the lower part of the wing, then it's a male. The first one was a female because it didn't have a dot. The second one was a male because it has a black dot. It's kind of like cologne for butterflies. The female smells it and thinks it smells good so she goes and finds the male. Can you tell which one is which in the above pictures?

Chrysalis

We looked at the chrysalises today and saw that one of them has some gold spots on it. So we looked it up in the book and found out that we think they use those to reflect off the sunlight so that when the birds fly by they know that it's not good to eat.

We could see a wing starting to form through the chrysalis. We have monarch chrysalises but there are other butterflys that looks almost exactly like it except for two black lines on the lower part of the bottom wings. This butterfly is called the viceroy. From a picture we saw that it's smaller than a monarch. We also learned that the monarch's colors proclaim to birds that it is distasteful so that is why the viceroy's colors are like the monarch's so that birds will leave it alone! I think the viceroy is just a big copycat!

Caterpillars!

We are raising caterpillars which we found on our milkweed plants. The caterpillars were getting eaten by the lizards so we cut some milkweed and brought it inside. The milkweed kept dying because there wasn't enough sunlight and the airconditioning wasn't helping either. We brought them outside and the next day we think one got stung by a wasp because it looked like it had exploded and a wasp was eating it. That's when we learned that wasps are carnivores and predators.

The next day, before my dad went to work, my mom asked if he could build something to go over them so protect them from lizards and wasps. We also wanted a place where we could see them turn into chrysalises. (Chrysalises are what they go into when they turn into butterflies.)

The two fattest and biggest ones went into their chrysalises. We are waiting for the butterflies to come out.