How much does the sun weigh?
The weight of the sun in tons is a staggering figure. You can write it down as 2,184,759 and then add 21 zeros to this number. We also can say that the total weight of our star is more than two million sextillion tons. Of course this is a mere estimate, an educated guess, and the sun may be several billion tons lighter or heavier than this figure. But this variation could be compared to your gaining or losing a couple of ounces.
In size, the sun is big enough to swallow our globe more than a million times. But when it cores to weight, our world is more solid. It would take only about 3009000 earth sized planets to equal the weight of our giant sun. What's more, our little earth is heavier for its size than any other object in the Solar System.
Is it true that a bee dies after she stings?
One of Andy’s helpers is Dr, Adrian Wenner, who knows a great deal about bees. Not so long ago, even the experts were not sure that the busy little honeybee is able to hear. Dr. Wenner has found that the bee can hear, though her ears are not at all like ours. Science is learning a whole lot of other new things about the busy honeybee and, it seems, her strange world is very different from what we thought it was.
The furry bee that buzzes around the garden is a worker bee and her whole life is spent in doing chores. During the busy summer season, when the world is bright with flowers, a honeybee can work herself to death in about six weeks. She feeds and tends the eggs and baby grubs. She makes wax and uses it to build honeycombs, she gathers nectar and uses it to make honey. She guards and repairs the hive and some of her time is spent waiting on her majesty, the queen mother.
With all these chores, the busy little bee has just one aim in life. Everything she does is to help the colony or family of bees that live together in the hive. And she will defend that hive with her life. She is, of course, fitted with a stinger which is a very powerful weapon to be used against enemies which threaten her beloved hive:
The sting is buried in the tail end of her furry tummy. The poison or venom is made in special glands and one drop of it is as strong as several drops of rattlesnake poison. However, she cannot do as much harm as a rattler because she cannot make a whole drop of her powerful poison. A supply of this venom is kept in a tiny, cone shaped sac.
Her stinger is a thorny needle with tiny barbs or prickles sprouting along the sides. The center of the needle is hollow. The stinger and the poison sac are connected by a wad of powerful muscles.
And when the bee pierces her stinger into an enemy, these, muscles pump venom into the stinger. The stinger works like a hypodermic needle and injects the poison into the unlucky enemy.
The little bee, however, is even more unlucky, for rarely if ever does she escape with her life. The stinger, remember, is fringed with tiny barbs. They drive the stinger deeper and deeper into the enemy, but they make it almost impossible for the bee to pull out her stinger when she wants to fly away. She pulls and pulls, and is almost always hopelessly damaged, Sometimes she leaves the stinger, its muscles and maybe its poison sac in the wound. But in any case she is so badly damaged that she flies away only to die.
The bee will attack with her stinger when she is threatened, or even when she just thinks she is threatened. When the hive is threatened, her she goes on the warpath with some of her angry sisters. A beekeeper may protect himself from his angry pets with special clothing or he may calm the bees with smoke. The bees also will remain calm. when they hear a sound wave that is about one and one half octaves higher than the middle C note on a piano.