‘Sidr, Tulsi, Jamun, Lychee, Ginger, Garlic’: A sneak peek into Asia’s largest honey museum

Hyderabad: Asia’s largest honey museum is located in Wayanad, Kerala. The Museum is spread out, and the guides are very knowledgeable. The museum is full of interesting exhibits. Dozens of kinds of honey are available there. Visitors are encouraged to taste and then buy. Raw honey, Forest honey, Sidr, Tulsi, Jamun, Lychee, Ginger, and Garlic honey are some of the delicious types of honey available here. Putt honey harvested from hives underground or in tree trunks is also available.

Bees are important for agriculture

Guide Vishnu Vinayak at the Honey Museum explained that 90 percent of wild plants and 75 percent of leading global crops depend on animal pollination. One out of every three mouthfuls of our food depends on pollinators such as bees. Crops that depend on pollination are five times more valuable than those that do not. Albert Einstein said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the Globe, then man would have only four years of life left.”

Bees have the unique ability to create the wonder food, honey. They belong to the insect order Hymenoptera and are considered to be social insects as they live in colonies. Bees are most important for agriculture as they pollinate one-third of the world’s food supply. The scientific name of honey bees is ‘Apis’, which is Latin for ‘Bees’. Most of the European honey bees fall under Apis Mellifera, with ‘Mellifera’ being the Latin word for ‘honey-bearing.’ The process of managing and breeding honey bees for acquiring honey and beeswax is known as apiculture or beekeeping. Apiculture is an old tradition that started with hunters in the forest in search of honey. 2 lakh flowers visited by bees will produce 1 kilogram of honey. There are three kinds of honey-Forest, Garden, and Farm honey.

Life Cycle of the Honeybee

The life cycle of honey bees is divided into four stages: the egg, the larval, the pupal, and the adult stage.

Stage 1 – The Egg Stage:

The queen bee is the only bee in the colony that is capable of laying about 2,000 to 3,000 eggs in one day. The egg is positioned upright and falls on the side by the third day. The queen bee lays both fertilized eggs and unfertilized eggs. The fertilized egg develops into female bees or queen bees. The unfertilized egg hatches, and male bees are born; also known as drone bees.

Stage 2 – The Larval Stage:

The difference between a worker and the queen bee is made three days after the egg transforms into larvae and six days after the egg is laid in the beehive. The ‘royal jelly’ is fed to all the larvae- the female bees, the workers, and the drone bees during their initial three days as larvae. The larva sheds skin multiple times throughout this stage. Later, the royal jelly is fed only to the female larvae, which eventually become a queen bee. Finally, the worker bees cover the top of the cell with beeswax to protect and facilitate the transformation of the larvae into a pupa.

Stage 3 – The Pupal Stage:

Here, the bee has developed parts like wings, eyes, legs, and small body hair that physically appear close to an adult bee.

Stage 4 – The Adult Stage:

Once the pupa is mature, the new adult bee chews its way out of the closed cell. The queen bee takes 16 days from the egg stage to form into an adult. The worker bee takes 18 to 22 days for complete development, and the drone bees take 24 days to develop into an adult bee.

Honey bees can travel around 20 miles per hour when going out of the hive for pollination and around 17 miles per hour while carrying the nectar back to the beehive. The average beehive can have from 20,000 to 50,000 honey bees and sometimes even 80,000 bees per beehive.

Construction of a hive

The young worker bees make the beeswax to make the beehive. The beeswax is made through eight paired glands in the abdomen region of the bee. These glands secrete liquid wax, which turns hard when exposed to air. The bees keep the wax in their mouths in order to maintain the working condition of the wax, which constructs the honeycomb.

Queen Bee

A Queen Bee can lay 500 to 2000 eggs a day and in her lifetime produce one million bees. If the queen bee dies in a beehive, the worker bees can create a new queen bee. They do this by selecting a young larva and by feeding it special food called ‘royal jelly’, the larva will develop into a fertile queen.

Royal Jelly

Royal jelly is a mix of different substances. Bees transform honey and pollen, mixing them with their saliva. What comes out is a gelatinous substance, very rich in important nutritional properties. Royal Jelly is greatly prized by humans for its nutritional properties and use in beauty products. 20 grams can be sold for Rs 2600.

Bee Dance

The language of honey bees, referring to their communication through dances, was primarily discovered by Karl von Frisch. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on decoding the waggle dance and round dance performed by honey bees to indicate food sources. Von Frisch's research, which began in the 1920s, revealed that honey bees use specific dances to communicate the location, distance, and quality of food sources to other bees. The waggle dance, in particular, conveys detailed information about the direction and distance of a food source relative to the sun's position, while the round dance indicates that flowers are close by.

His work highlighted the complex and sophisticated communication system used by honey bees, and their ability to transmit information about remote events, a concept less common in animal communication. This discovery has been crucial for understanding bee behavior and has implications for various fields, including beekeeping and environmental monitoring.

Colony Collapse Disorder

In 2006, beekeepers first began to notice the disappearance of large bee colonies, and this sudden disappearance of large colonies of bees was called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). There are several possible reasons for this disorder, like climate change, genetically modified crops, usage of pesticides, and even electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones.