How Do Honey Bees Make Beeswax

Beeswax is the foundation of the hive. Honey bees build their comb from beeswax, and fill the hexagonal cells with honey and brood. Do you know how honey bees make beeswax? How Honey Bees Produce Beeswax Young worker bees are charged with the task of making beeswax for the colony. Soon after a new worker bee emerges as an adult, it begins producing wax. Honey bee workers have four pairs of special wax-secreting glands on the undersides of their abdomens. From these glands,  they secrete liquified wax, which hardens into thin scales when exposed to the air.  As the worker bee ages, these glands atrophy and the task of making wax is left to younger bees.   During its peak wax production phase, a healthy worker bee can produce about eight scales of wax in a 12 hour period. The bee colony requires about 1,000 wax scales to make a single gram of beeswax for their comb.  The geometry of the honeycomb allows the bee colony to maximize their storage space while minimizing the quantity of wax needed to build the structure. How Bees Use Wax to Build Honeycomb After the soft wax hardens, the worker bee uses stiff hairs on her hind legs to scrape the wax from her abdomen. She passes the wax forward to her middle legs, and then to her mandibles. The bee chews the wax until it is pliable, and carefully shapes it into the hexagonal cells that make up the colonys honeycomb. Worker bees use their mouths to measure the thickness of the honeycomb as they build it, so they know whether more or less wax is needed. What Is Beeswax? Beeswax is a secretion produced by worker bees in the family Apidae, but we most often associate it with honey bees (Apis mellifera). Its composition is quite complex. Beeswax consists mainly of esters of fatty acids (fatty acids combined with alcohol), but over 200 other minor components have been identified in beeswax. New beeswax is light yellow in color, mainly due to the presence of pollen, but over time it darkens to a golden yellow. Beeswax turns brown from contact with bees and propolis. Beeswax is a remarkably stable substance that remains solid through a wide temperature range. It has a melting point of 64.5 degrees Celcius, and only becomes brittle when the temperature drops below 18 degrees Celcius. The honeycomb can therefore withstand the temperature fluctuations from season to season, which is key to the honey bee colonys survival through the summer heat and winter cold. Uses of Beeswax Like honey, beeswax is a valuable commodity that beekeepers can harvest and sell for many commercial uses. Beeswax is widely used by the cosmetics industry, in everything from lotions to lip balms. Cheese makers use it as a coating to prevent spoilage. Candles have been formed from beeswax since the 6th century. Beeswax is even used in medicines (as a coating), electrical components, and varnishes. Sources: Encyclopedia of Insects,  2nd edition, edited by Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Carde.Production and Trade of Beeswax, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, accessed online May 27, 2016.The Backyard Beekeeper: An Absolute Beginners Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden , Kim Flottum, Quarry Books, 2010Commercial Products, from Insects, Irwin, M.E. G.E. Kampmeier. 2002.

A Brief Note On Open Ended And Problem Solving - 1403 Words

Problem solving requires multiple cognitive processes in order to determine a final resolution. These skills are critical to establish a proper solution for day to day problems, such as social problem solving, open ended/problem-solving questions, and advanced mathematical problem solving. However, these skills differ from one person to another, and some individuals excel in this area more then others. This paper will summarize whether there are gender differences in a variety of problem solving, if any. This is a significant topic, mostly because it can explain the phenomenon of how humans are able to excel in some types of problem solving, yet reduce in specialty depending on their gender. This summarization will analyze three different†¦show more content†¦The procedure of this study began with students being split up into groups and assigned different studies by Moreno (1998) including computer-generated animations, summaries containing short captions with illustrations, general texts and detailed texts; all based on lightning. Afterwards, disregarding gender, participants were assigned to treatment groups, they then analyzed three tests done to the students. To begin, all students’ SAT scores were analyzed in correlation with their genders to determine whether their gender had an impact on their overall scores. Second, they analyzed the students’ answers for whether they believed they can change a natural phenomenon such as lightening. And lastly, the retention and the total scores were recorded from each study. This study measured the participants retention and transfer that was measured, because it provides an understanding of the material and how they connect it to open-ended questions as well as how much was learnt. The independent variable is the open-ended questions and information provided to them and the dependent variable is the subjects. Overall, there was a significantly greater amount of females who responded with the fac t that they cannot control nature when asked if they could change a natural phenomenon such as lightening, compared to males. First, this study suggests that males are significantly better at scientific problem-solving in comparison to females, however when the experiment was further

The Final Girl free essay sample

One of the more important, if not groundbreaking, accounts/recuperations of the horror film from a feminist perspective is Carol Clovers Men, Women, and Chainsaw. One of the books major points concerns the structural positioning of what she calls the Final Girl in relation to spectatorship. While most theorists label the horror film as a male-driven/male-centered genre, Clover points out that in most horror films, especially the slasher film, the audience, male and female, is structurally forced to identify with the resourceful young female (the Final Girl) who survives the serial attacker and usually ends the threat (until the sequel anyway). So while the narratively dominant killers subjective point of view may be male within the narrative, the male viewer is still rooting for the Final Girl to overcome the killer. We can see this operating archetypically in Halloween (Jamie Lee Curtis, 1978), Friday the 13th (Betsy Palmer, 1980), Eyes of a Stranger (Jennifer Jason Leigh, 1981), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Heather Langenkamp, 1984). We will write a custom essay sample on The Final Girl or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page One of the books central strengths is the direct simplicity of its central premise: taking the classic Laura Mulvey male-centered identification process of sadistic-voyeur and flipping it around to a masochistic-voyeur (by having the identification process shift to the usually female victim/Final Girl). Vis-a-vis the Mulvian argument against male-driven cinematic pleasure, Clover does for the horror film what Gaylyn Studlar did for the Sternberg-Dietrich films: swapping the Post-Oedipal, male voyeuristic-sadistic impulse for a more feminine, Pre-Oedipal masochistic impulse. In psychoanalytical terms, sadism is post-Oedipal, meaning that it takes shape when identification shifts from the mother to the father. Masochism, deriving pleasure from ones own pain or submission, is pre-Oedipal and takes place when the mother is all powerful and is the source of the childs identification (from the womb to the breast). In the pre-Oedipal stage the child takes pleasure in this pure submission to the mother. (Fellini once said a similar thing about why his films are populated with large, motherly women and motherly prostitutes: because of middle aged men not wanting to let go of that pleasure of unadorned submission. In relating this to the Sternberg/Dietrich films, the implication is that one can also identify with the submissive male or female character one finds in each of the films. When turning this over to the horror film, as in the traditional slasher film, the spectator assumes a submissive position whenever they identify with the female victim, and more importantly, the female heroine.