Reading Comprehension — Bees and Honey

Read two short passages about a bee swarm and how bees make honey and answer ten questions.

The Swarm

Pom! Pom! Pom! Jacques was banging a key on the watering can, and Mother Ambroisine was banging a saucepan. People believed the noise would make bees land nearby, though Uncle Paul was not so sure.

Above the garden, a cloud of bees was flying round and round. Slowly the cloud came down onto the currant bush. The bees hung from a branch in a big bunch. The first bees held on to the branch, others held on to their legs, and more held on to them: thousands of bees.

"Will they sting us?" asked Jules.

"Not if we leave them alone," said Uncle Paul. "They are busy looking for a new home. Their old hive got too crowded, so the old queen has left with some of them. A group like this is called a swarm."

That evening Jacques built them a new wooden hive.

Making Honey

A worker bee starts work at sunrise. It visits flower after flower, drinking sweet nectar and storing it in a special stomach called a crop.

It also collects pollen. It rolls in the flowers until its fuzzy body is dusty and yellow. Then it brushes the pollen into little balls and packs them into baskets on its back legs.

Back at the hive, the bee spits the nectar into a wax cell. Inside the bee, the nectar has already started turning into honey. The pollen goes into another cell, as food for the young bees.

When the cells are full, the bees seal them with lids of wax. The honey is saved for rainy days and winter, when there are no flowers.

"So bees don't make honey for us?" asked Emile.

"No," said Uncle Paul. "They make it for themselves. We just take some."

Adapted from The Story-book of Science by Jean-Henri Fabre (1917).