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Honey Bears Bee-liciously handsome honey bears. Pure varietal honey poured into these adorable 12 oz. bear bottles. They make a wonderful gift and your children or grandchildren will love them. Collect all the varieties, color coded for easy identification, or order a three-pack gift basket for a friend. Please select as many boxes as you wish, then click on the gold Add button. Buttery Herb Honey Buckwheat Honey Carolina Tupelo Honey Orange Blossom Honey 12 oz. plastic bottles - $2.99 ea. Please select as many boxes as you wish, then click on the gold Add button. Entering your zip code keeps a running tally of your product selections and shipping rates. Nothing is final until you submit your order through our secure shopping cart. Thank you - Appalachian Traveller. Honeybees were introduced to the American colonies from European settlers who had learned how to manage bee colonies using smoke to contol their activity. An Appalachian beekeeper would build beegums from hollow stumps, adding entrance and exit holes, capping them with removeable lids to harvest the honey. About Honey Bees Honey bees naturally dwell in the hollow spaces of trees as social colonies of one fertile queen, a few male drones for mating, and many sterile females. A worker bee's life cycle averages just over a month. During her life she'll play various roles in developing, maintaining, and protecting the colony. Beeswax is made from sugar of flower nectar converted by special glands in their bodies. The young bees, less than two weeks old, form the wax into honeycomb cells that will house the eggs, larvae, honey, and pollen, and others will nurse the youngest bees and care for the undeveloped drones and queens. Chambers are constructed of six-sided wax cells, capped and arranged vertically and latterally to form a beehive. Older workers protect the hive from marauding animals and insects, and the oldest worker bees will forage for flowering plants, collect the nectar and pollen and return to the hive to make a deposit. Upon returning to the hive with pollen and nectar, the nectar collecting field bee will perform an elaborate dance to communicate the location of the flowering source. She "waggles" her body from side to side as she moves forward in a straight line, then circles to the right, and then to the left forming a figure eight. The dance communicates to the other forager bees the direction (relative to the sun) and distance from the hive of the nectar source. Beekeepers simulate natural spaces for bees by constructing hives made from rectagular boxes that have chambers for bees to raise their young and store honey, and openings for bee travel and honey collection. These beehives, or in the olden days hollow logs called bee gums, are located near flowering plants and are maintained by the beekeeper to protect the bees from disease, pests, and foul weather. If a queen bee is not laying eggs a beekeeper will replace her with another queen from larvae fed a special diet of "royal jelly."     About Pure Honey Bees collect nectar and pollen in the spring and summer from flowering plants, including fruit trees and wildflowers, to use for food and building material. Under the right soil and weather conditions, the bees will produce much more honey than they can use. Beekeepers collect that excess from the honey combs, purify it, and label it's flavor according to the predominant flowering source. Honey varieties will therefore vary by region and the predominent flower source. Soil conditions, processing methods, and honey-comb quality are also factors influencing how honey tastes and looks. In commercial beekeeping, bees are transported by truck from one region of the country to another to let their bees collect flavorful nectar for making honey, to overwinter their bees in southern climates, and to pollinate farmers crops. American beekeepers get orange blossom honey from orchards of Florida orange trees, clover honey from the Northeast and Midwest, sourwood honey from the southern Appalachian Mountains, mesquite honey from mesquite shrubs on southwestern deserts, starthistle honey from the starthistle weed in the North, blackberry honey from blackberry blossoms, and other varities from indigenous wildflowers, grains, and herbs. Blended honey is that you'll find in supermarket chains, and does not provide the unique taste of varietal "monofloral" honey. It has also been processed in a manner to preserve shelf life, and in doing so, loses it's natural flavor and nutritional value. About Pollination Flowers, fruits, and vegetables require pollination to reproduce, and bees as well as other flying insects, provide that service in exchange for the nectar they receive. Bees that visit flowering plants in the spring collect pollen on their bodies, that when transported and deposited on another plant of the same species, will allow it to produce the flowers, fruits and vegetables we enjoy. Today, wild honeybees are mostly gone, and kept honeybees are dwindling. Pesticides, parasites and diseases, urban development and clearcut logging, and the loss of forage plants have dramatically reduced the natural pollinators. Produce farmers cannot rely on natural pollination of their fruits and vegetables anymore, and must manage pollination, just as they do fertility, pest, and disease control. Excellent fruit and vegetable flavor requires full pollination and poorly pollinated crops are a result of too few bees to the blossom. You can taste and see the difference in poorly pollinated produce. A starchy tasting apple, or flat tasting, rather than sweet, watermelon is a tell-tale sign of incomplete pollination. A filled out and rounded fruit or vegetable is a visual indication of a well pollinated crop. Copyright © 1998-2001. Appalachian Traveller, Inc. All Rights Reserved.