Bee's Knees

This month's edition of Discover magazine had a page devoted to 20 Things You Didn't Know About Bees:

When the drones mate with the Queen, they die afterwards from a ruptured abdomen. Their endophallus becomes detached and gets stuck inside the queen. She, however, continues to mate until she collects more than 70 million sperm from multiple males.

Australian researchers discovered that honeybees can distinguish between human faces and Los Alamos scientists have trained bees to recognize explosives.

In April, 1984, 3,300 bees were sent into space on the Challenger space shuttle. They built a near perfect hive in zero gravity, but did not go to the bathroom for seven days. Bees will not go inside their hive and since they could not get out of their holding box, they held it for a week.

American cartoonist, Tad Dorgan, came up with the expression, "bee's knees", "the cat's pajamas", "the flea's eyebrows", "the canary's tusks" and "Yes, we have no bananas."