By CINDY LADAGE
Illinois Correspondent

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — The beekeepers’ display at this year’s Illinois State Fair featured award-winning honey samples as well as several sculptures created from beeswax.

One winning compilation included a flower arrangement with delicate daffodils and other flowers arranged in a basket. A couple of plate-shaped scenes were also on display, and there was even a rather amazing fish display. The beeswax sculptures showed how versatile this medium is.

A brochure for the American Bee Journal was available to assist beekeepers in their business or hobby. Established in 1861 by Samuel Wagner, the journal has been in constant publication except for a brief pause during the Civil War. The publication hails from Hamilton, Ill., and is published by Dadant & Sons, Inc.

This publisher also supplied an informational brochure titled, Me? Beekeeping! In this publication it shared that honey was originally gathered from hollow trees. Honeybees arrived in the United States when pioneers brought them during emigration. Indians called them “the white man’s flies.”

There are a lot of misconceptions about bees. “Many times people cannot even recognize the difference between honeybees, wasps, hornets, bumblebees or yellow jackets. They categorize all insects that buzz and sting into the same group,” the publication stated.

The honeybees are in three distinct categories: there is the queen bee that everyone knows about, and then there are the other females – the worker bees – and male drones. Only the queen and worker bees can sting; the drones do not. The brochure pointed out honeybees only sting when their home is threatened.

“Honeybees are social insects,” the brochure shared. “They bond together and divide labor.”

Each type of honeybee has distinctive jobs and colony numbers fluctuate in size. In the winter a colony may have only 7,000 bees while in summer it may top out at 70,000. The colony consists of one queen, several hundred drones and thousands of workers.

The queen is the center of the hive and begins her life as a regular female worker larvae. She consumes royal jelly provided by the worker honeybees. The job of the queen is to lay eggs. The drones’ only job is mating and the worker females gather the nectar, secures the beeswax and build the honeycomb.

Worker bees travel a distance of approximately 55,000 miles. Besides producing delectable honey, bees provide a far more important job of pollination, which can determine the survival of a plant population. According to the brochure, “If honeybees ceased to exist today, one-third of all foods we eat would disappear.”

This amazing statistic is mind-boggling when one realizes the importance of the bee population. Because pollination allows flowering plants to reproduce, beekeeping is often popular for both farmers and gardeners.