Honeydew is a sweet substance excreted by aphids, also called plant lice, which are small, soft-bodied insects. They feed on the fluids in plants using a needle-like, biting mouthpart and are considered plant pests because they can damage trees, garden flowers, or agricultural crops if their population is large. Ladybugs, also known as ladybird beetles, are frequently released on aphid-infested plants because these beetles are predatory and eat aphids.
As the aphids suck liquids from the plants, they exude drops of liquid waste called honeydew. It is a clear, sticky liquid often seen on automobiles parked under trees and on car windshields during the summer. Bees, ants, and some caterpillars sip drops of excess honeydew that the aphids excrete. Bees in habitats that have lots of aphids but few flowering plants collect the honeydew and bring it back to the hive to be made into "flea honey."
Nectar that is turned into honey is gathered by bees drop by drop. It has been estimated that bees have to visit two million flowers to obtain enough nectar to make one eight-ounce jar of honey. They have to fly approximately fifty-five thousand miles back and forth from flowers to hive to gather enough nectar for that one jar, and to make one gallon of honey they have to fly the distance to the moon and back. How much honey a hive produces varies greatly, depending on the climate, location, weather, and general health of the bees, but the amount ranges from about fifty pounds to as much as two hundred pounds in a year.
About 150 million pounds of honey are obtained each year in the United States from commercial sources. About five hundred thousand people keep hives, and there are approximately 2.5 million colonies of bees according to the U.S. National Agricultural Statistics Service. The amount of honey that is harvested from smaller beekeeping operations and hobbyist beekeepers is impossible to estimate.
Prior to the 1980s, beekeeping was a very common hobby. Many hobbyist beekeepers lived in rural areas, and the beehives provided pollination for small gardens and local fruit orchards and supplied the household with honey and beeswax. In the 1980s, parasitic tracheal mites arrived in the United States and infested many colonies, and in the 1990s, Varroa mites and small hive beetles joined the party, resulting in the demise of most rural colonies. Most beekeeping is presently being done commercially; although, with the recent interest in honey bees due to the publicity about colony collapse disorder, there is a resurgence of interest in keeping bees.
In 2007, the state with the most honey-producing honey bee colonies was North Dakota, with California and South Dakota in second and third place, respectively. Kentucky had the fewest number of registered bee colonies. The greatest yield per colony was from Mississippi, but total production was highest from North Dakota, California, and South Dakota, with Florida coming in very close to the top three producers. According to the Agricultural Statistics Board of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the total value of honey production across the United States in 2007 was $153,233,000.
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