How do bees run their hive?   A bee’s life is very organised. Each bee —queen, drone and worker — has a special role,  and it is the queen and worker bees who decide how many drones there should be in 1 the hive. All the worker bees are sterile females and the drones are male. There are about 6o,000 bees in the hive and only about 1,000 of these are...

How many bees live in a hive?   On average, there are about 6o,000 worker bees living in a hive. On top of this you must allow for the drones and, of course, the queen bee. It is an amazing figure when you think of the size of the hive and the amount of honey that is stored there during the winter. As you know, the drones are turned out as...

What is a Queen Bee? You must have heard of the expression ‘queen bee’ describing someone who does lots of work in a community and enjoys being the centre of attention. This aptly describes the role of the queen bee in a hive of honey bees. Honey bees, like ants, are social insects, and long ago man found that they were quite happy to live as a colony in a wooden...

How widespread is the use of Television?   Television is used in many industries. Banks and stores use ‘closed-circuit’ TV for security. Undersea oil-wells use remote-controlled cameras to check pipelines. Nuclear power stations use TV to watch dangerous areas. But its most widespread use is broadcasting the programmes we watch at home. TV brings us entertainment, news and advertisements. Once people had to amuse themselves or go to a local theatre....

What is an outside broadcast?   Of course, if we want to make a programme about an earthquake, or even a city street, we cannot bring this inside the studio. Instead we take the studio outside. The ‘outside broadcast’ teams use a specially-equipped van as a mobile control-room. They have smaller, movable cameras and microphones. There are even video-tape cameras, for making TV recordings, not much bigger than home-movie cameras. In...

How is a Television programme made? The picture below shows a pop group making a television programme. As well as the performers a lot of other people with a lot of equipment are needed to produce a programme. The three cameramen operate the TV cameras. Each can take a picture of the whole scene or a close-up, perhaps of just the singer’s face. Using a special lens the camera can even...

How does your Television set make a picture? The television receiver does the opposite of what the camera did. On your TV screen is a chemical that glows when electrons hit it. An electron beam moves across the screen exactly in step with the beam in the camera. The current sent from the camera controls the strength of the beam. A strong beam gives a bright spot, a weak beam a...

When was Television invented? John L. Baird of Scotland made the first simple television soon after the first world war. Public TV started in 1936 in Britain.   How does a television camera work ? A TV camera has to convert a whole picture into an electric current. First of all a picture, called an ‘image’, of the scene in front of the camera is focused onto a screen inside. A...