Quiz Answers: Bees

Here are the answers to yesterday's Bee quiz. 

1. The ancient civilization which used honey as currency and later minted coins with the image of a bee on them was (c) the Roman Empire. Ancient Romans honored the honeybee for its industry. Egyptians and Greeks kept bees anciently, but did not use them as currency.

2. A single colony of honeybees can contain (c) 20,000-80,000 individuals. That's a lot of bees! Consider full capacity at Petco Park is less than 50,000.

3. Their first week on the job, adult worker honeybees (a) clean the hive. The second week they are promoted to feed the young. Third-week bees make and repair wax cells, and graduate their fourth week to guarding the hive.

4. The Australian "karbi" bee uses a form of torture on intruders which was borrowed years ago in the form of the "rack." The correct answer is (b): guard bees latch onto the intruder's limbs and pull - stretching them to their full extent for an hour. Does this make for taller bees? Or fewer intruders? Kind of explains Australian football, doesn't it?

5. Of the 15 states which have identified the European honey bee as the official state insect, (b) Nebraska and New Jersey are the two listed. Complete list: Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. To the best of our knowledge, Utah is the only one to have a minor league baseball team actually named "The Bees."

6. It would take (d) 9-10 bees to equal the weight of one M&M's plain candy. This factoid will not do much for bee control, but it may be a fascinating conversation starter. Or not.

7. A queen bee must eat (d) 80 times her weight each day to produce 2,000 eggs. To put this in perspective, this would be like a 12-year-old human eating 6400 pounds of food. That's a lot of M&M's!

8. Surprisingly, the average life span of a queen bee is (d) 2-8 years. Obviously, after all that food, they must work out.

For an interesting video on the life cycle of bees, click here. Another great video taking you inside the hive is found here.