How bees produce wax and honey

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How bees produce wax and honey, honey
(Image courtesy: wikimedia commons)
              The wax produced by worker bees is used in making honeycombs consisting of six-sided cells into each of which the queen bee lays an egg that will eventually give birth to an insect. Other cells in the honey comb act as a storage places for honey.
              Bees produce wax in very thin sheets from eight glands on their abdomens. It takes some 1,250 of these sheets to make up one gram of wax. We can imagine the amount of hard work that goes into the construction of a honey comb. Not only does the bee produce the wax, but it also shapes it into the hexagonal cell.
              Chemically, beeswax consists mainly of esters of fatty acids and various long-chain alcohols. It is used as a glazing agent, a sweetener, or in the production of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Do you know, it is the main diet of Wax moth larvae.
              The honey is nectar from flowers which has been gathered, concentrated and digested by the bees. The honey still has the scent of the flowers where the bees first found it.  

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