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Saturday, February 04, 2012

The Amazing Queen Bee

In this morning's email from Naturebee, there is an interesting piece of trivia about the queen bee (assuming a life span of three years).  Times have certainly changed - note the length of the chicken egg used for comparison in this 1895 article is 1 1/2 inches - just dawned on me from the photo below (not with the article) that they may have measured the breadth of the egg - I assumed end to end since they referred to the length of the bee egg.  There are no eggs in my refrigerator this morning shorter in length than 2 1/4 inches.  The queen would still win out by a very long distance:



* A queen will lay a half mile of eggs
in her life time (three years), while a
hen in the same time, allowing 200 eggs
a year and one and one-half inch to the
egg, will only lay seventy-five feet of
eggs. A queen bee's egg is one-fourteenth
of an inch in length.

Source:
Homestead
Friday, March 22, 1895 Des Moines, Iowa

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:03 AM

    They should have mentioned that it takes a hen about 25 hrs to make an egg while a queen bee lays eggs one after another.

    It's neat to see the inside of a butchered laying hen: there will be eggs in all stages of growth, from the smallest to the largest, just waiting to be laid.
    Anna in MD

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, that was interesting.

    ReplyDelete