BUSY AS A BEE
Bees are very busy, if you mean honey bee workers and workers of other hive-dwelling social bees. All the bees in a hive have assigned duties. For the queen and also the males, called drones, the tasks are simple. The queen lays eggs, producing more bees, and the drones fertilize the queen. But the real busy bees are the workers, which are undeveloped female bees. Workers gather nectar to make honey, build the wax combs in which larvae are raised, defend the hive, feed the queen and the larvae, and when the hive gets too warm, they cool things down by flapping their wings—up to 11,000 times per minute. A big hive will include as many as 60,000 busy workers, each of which may live for about 35 days.