New Zealand Quality Service Awards

3 During its entire lifetime, one bee will create only about one- twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. So that 350-gram jar in the pantry equates to the life’s work of 864 bees. To produce half a kilogram of honey, a bee colony needs to visit about two million flowers. 4 It may sound like something out of The Lord of the Rings , but rare Elvish honey gets ex- tracted not from a hive but from the walls of caves in northeastern Tür- kiye. In Turkish, this elixir is called peri bali , which translates to ‘fairy honey’ or ‘elf honey’. Honey harvest- ed from this region is said to be rich in minerals, and at the equivalent of more than NZ$245 per 30 grams, it’s among the world’s most expensive. 5 Know anyone named Melis- sa? The name comes from the Greek for ‘honeybee’. According to one version of a story from Greek mythology, Melissa was a nymph who learned about the many uses of honey from bees themselves. When she nursed baby Zeus, rather than milk, she gave him ‘nectar of the gods’ – honey. 6 We all know beeswax is in candles and lip balms, but it appears in more surprising places, too, such as food wraps and cough syrup. Propolis, or ‘bee glue’, a sticky mix of beeswax, beesaliva and tree sap, finds its way into per- sonal-care products thanks to its antiseptic, antibacterial and anti- inflammatory properties. Another bee by-product, royal jelly, can ease symptoms of PMS and menopause. 7 The queen bee doesn’t rule the hive as you might think, unlike the bossy ‘queen bees’ in high schools. The literal queen’s job is to lay eggs (as many as 1500 per day) while worker bees clean and feed her – and even predigest her food. With- out their constant care, the queen would die. And when her time does eventually come, her death is hard- ly dignified. As she nears the end of her life, the worker bees raise a new queen, which stings the old queen to death before taking over. 8 You may have heard that if a bee stings you, it dies. But this is true only for honeybees. Oth- er bees, including bumblebees and carpenter bees, can sting multiple times. In 1962, in what had to be one of the worst days of his life, a man in Zimbabwe survived getting stung more than 2400 times. Roughly 500 bee species have no stingers at all. To defend themselves, they bite. 9 Fewer than three per cent of adults worldwide are aller- gic to bee stings, but it’s still a common fear. Even elephants are terrified of bees. They will try to shoo readersdigest.co.nz 15 13 Things