Birds can fly – why can’t we? Some of man’s oldest legends are about his dream of flying. A Greek myth tells of Daedalus and his son Icarus. They escaped from the island of Crete using wings of wax and feathers. Icarus was supposed to have flown too near the sun. It melted his wings and he fell into the sea and drowned. Many people, seeing birds fly, thought feathers were...

Mongol Empire At its height, the Mongol Empire covered almost the whole of Asia. It ran from the coast of China to the borders of Europe, extend north into Russia and south into Persia. No other empire in history has controlled such huge piece of territory, which amounted to about a fifth of the land surface of the world ! yet it began in a small way and lasted a comparatively...

How did rockets originate and develop? Rockets were first known to be used in 1232, when the Mongols were advancing into China. While besieging a Chinese city, they came under attack from rockets carrying fire. The Chinese had invented gunpowder long before, and developed their fire rockets from rockets used in fireworks. However, gun-power came to be used to fire cannons and rockets were little used thereafter. In 1420, an Italian...

What kind of weapons were used by ancient man? The first kind of tool made by man was a stone that was broken to give an edge that could be used for scraping. These simple pebble tools were used probably more than one million years ago. Eventually, ancient man found that a stone could be shaped into a blade. A rough one is called a chopper and a sharper blade a...

Why do bees dance? Honey bees take nectar and pollen from bright, open flowers like buttercups, daisies and roses. The whole life of the hive depends upon the worker bees finding the right sort of flowers, so they send scouts out to hunt for them. When they return, the scouts show the workers where to go by performing a ‘dance’ on the comb. The round dance means that food is nearby....

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...