Bees + Beards = ?

What?  What an odd equation.  What's a bee beard?  What's a bee beard competition?  I asked myself those same questions when I stumbled upon some strange pictures in the news...  Yikes!  Of course, I had to look into what this was all about.

(He's wearing over 5 pounds of bees!)

After I did some research, I found out that these competitions actually happen in several places.  These pictures are from a contest last week in Ontario, Canada.  

     

This is called bee bearding.  Each and every bee colony has a queen, which all the other bees can recognize by her smell.  By placing the queen in a certain spot, all of the other bees gather around her, and that's what makes the "beard" of bees!  It looks pretty crazy, doesn't it!  Bee bearding was also once used to attract customers' attentions to sell honey.  

More pictures from the Clovermead Bees and Honey competition.

There was another competition this past week in China, and they went even further by creating an entire bee suit!  

There's actually another bee bearding competition next week in Vancouver, Canada.  

Bee bearding is actually even in the Guinness Book of World Records, and the category is the "Most pounds of bees worn on the body."  The world record is held by Mark Biancaniello, who wore over 87 pounds of bees (roughly 350,000 bees) on his body in 1998.

Obviously, don't try this at home!

This reminded me of a book I have called Big Bug Surprise about a little girl who knows all about insects.  Good thing she knows all about bees and bee colonies!