Facts About Honey Bees & Honey

Did you know that an average size hive of bees fly about 55,000 miles to make one pound of honey....visiting 2 million flowers... in roughly 80,000 trips?

A female worker bee will make about 1/12 of a teaspoon in her lifespan of roughly 45 days.

The drone bee dies when it mates with the queen, the rest of the time before that he eats, drinks beer and lays around and watches TV and if he's lucky, he is selected to stay during the winter for the queen mating in the spring, if not, he's pushed out of the hive for the winter and dies.

Honey bees have 5 eyes, 3 simple eyes on top of its head, and 2 compound eyes, with numerous hexagonal facets.

That buzzing sound you hear is their wings flapping over 200 times per second...12,000 per minute.

Honey has natural preservatives that prevent bacteria from growing in it.

A group of honeybees that live together is called a "colony", and the hive is their home. A colony can have a few thousand honeybees in the winter and up to 20-30,000 honeybees in the summer. A hive can be in a tree, a beekeeper's box, or anywhere the bees are safe, warm, and dry.

Honey bees are important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables. Bees transfer pollen between the male and female plant parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit.

The Queen bee runs the whole hive. Her job is to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive’s next generation of bees. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behaviour of the other bees.

If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva and feeding it a special food called “royal jelly“. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.

Honey bees are great flyers. They fly at a speed of around 15 mph and beat their wings 200 times per second!

A honey bee has 170 odorant receptors, which means it has a sensitive sense of smell!

The queen bee can live up to five years. She is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!

To share information with the rest of thecolony about where the best food sources are located, they perform a ‘waggle dance’. When the worker returns to the hive, it moves in a figure-of-eight and waggles its body to indicate the direction of the food source.

The honey bee is one of the most scientifically studied creatures in the world after man!

The honey bee's brain is about the size of a tiny grain of sugar, but researchers have found that it is surprisingly sophisticated. Specifically, honey bees can understand conceptual relationships such as "same/different" and "above/below" that rely on relationships between objects rather than simply the physical features of objects.

Honey can be fermented to make a type of wine, called ‘mead’. The earliest evidence for the production of mead is from Northern China, and dates to back to about 7000 BC.