This is the VOA SpecialEnglish Agriculture Report.
Last week we talked about how bees make honey. However, beesproduce a number of useful materials.
Beeswax is another. Worldproduction is more than ten thousand tons a year. Yet, this is muchless than the total honey production, which is more than one-milliontons per year. Bees need to eat about three kilograms of honey, ormore, to produce less than one half of a kilogram of wax.
The beauty industry uses a lot of beeswax. It provides a base forskin products and skin medicines. Candles used for lighting andreligious ceremonies are made of beeswax. And woodworkers mix itwith oils to protect wood surfaces. Leatherworkers use beeswax toprotect leather from water.
Beekeepers may be the biggest users of beeswax. They use it tomake structures called foundations. Bees build hives by adding waxto the foundations. Bees keep honey, food and their young in thesestructures.
Surprisingly, the poison from a bee sting is a valuable product.Worker bees have a sting that can inject poison. In some people, abee sting causes their throat or tongue to swell up. This reactioncan cause death. Sometimes, treatment with bee poison can helpreduce such reactions.
In North and South America, Asia and Europe, tiny creaturescalled mites can destroy hives. The mites suck the blood of bees.Wax moths are insects that eat wax in the hive. There are alsodiseases caused by bacteria: European and American foulbrood. Thebacteria that cause these diseases attack and destroy young bees.
Beekeepers in the warm areas of the Americas also must beconcerned about Africanized bees. African bees were brought to SouthAmerica to improve honey production. They quickly spread out ofcontrol.
Today, they have mixed with European honey bee populations raisedin the Americas. Africanized honey bees are very aggressive. Theyhave killed animals and people. In the Seventies, they became knownas “killer bees.” Africanized bees are not really “killer bees,” butthey must be treated with special care.
All these problems add to the cost of keeping bees. Butbeekeeping remains mostly low cost and very important to agriculture– as we will see next week.
This VOA Special English Agriculture Report was written by MarioRitter.