Sweet...

One of the fun things about my job here at Mantor Library is that I get to design some of the educational displays featured around the library. September is National Honey Month, which sort of dovetails nicely with the themes we're building our programming around this year: food, environment, sustainability, and the global impact of the choices we all, as consumers, make every day. So doing a display about honey seemed like a no brainer. While setting up the display, I came across so many amazing facts about honey. I'm going to share some with you,
just in case you can't get in to see the display for yourself.
(And, frankly, because I've gotten out of the swing of posting, and I've got nothing else, inspiration-wise!)
So here we go: Amazing Factoids about honey & honey bees...
1. A bee must fly the equivalent of three times around the globe to gather the nectar to make a single teaspoon of honey.
2. A colony of bees flies approximately 55,000 miles - more than the distance to the moon and back - to make a pound of honey.
3. A worker bee will make about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. Consider THAT before you throw a honey spoon in the sink without first licking it clean!
4. A foraging bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers per flight.
5. In order to produce a pound of honey, 2 million flowers will be visited.
6. A foraging bee will travel up to a three mile radius around the hive in search of nectar, pollen, and water.
7. There are three types of bees in a hive: a single queen, who is the only fertile bee in the hive: she lays all the eggs. The worker bees are female, do all of the work, and have a life span of 6-8 weeks during the foraging season. Male bees are called drones. They have no stingers, and do no work. Their sole job is to mate with virgin queens. In early autumn, their sisters drive them out of the hive and kill them rather than feed them all winter. Ouch.

Cool, huh? I thought you'd like that. And now, before I go, can I just say how nice it is to look around the library, and see students and faculty studying, browsing, using the computers and media rooms, making this place the hive of activity (Oh yes I did. I went there.) it should be? Welcome back, citizens of UMF. We missed you. Hope your summer was as sweet as....well, you know.