The Honey Bee: Amazing Facts and Feats
The Honey Bee: Amazing Facts and Feats
Believe it or not, over 22000 kinds of bee have been discovered!
The bee has been known to the human race for many thousands of years. There is a very old educational painting in a rock shelter in Spain depicting bees.
Stone Age man ate honey which he stole from the nests of wild bees.
Bees were first kept by man in hollow logs with sticks to support the honey combs. Later man kept bees in straw baskets called ‘skeps’ and today, bees are kept in standard hives.
There are about 10,000 species of bees which roughly are divided into two main groups: Social Bees that live in colonies and Solitary Bees that live alone.
Three kinds of bees make up a honey bee colony. The colony consists of thousands of workers, one queen and few hundred drones.
The WORKERS (infertile females) numbering about 10,000 in winter and increasing to about 60,000 in mid summer
DRONES (male bees) numbering 200 - 1,000 approximately and are present in the colony mainly during the summer month.
Worker Bees build honeycombs, feed the larva, clean the hive, and build honeycomb.
The drone bees mate with the queen bee.
The queen bee lays eggs and is the ruler of the hive.
First, a field bee collects nectar. Next the honeybee turns the nectar into sweet honey.
Finally the honey is put into cells called honeycombs and then a cap of bees wax is put onto the top of the honeycomb.
The taste and color depends on the nectar. They take it back to the hive in a honey stomach.
Honey bees must visit some 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey.
Honey bees fly about 55,000 miles to bring in enough nectar to make one pound of honey.
About one ounce of honey would fuel a honey bee's flight around the world.
Honey bees have been producing honey from flowering plants for about 10-20 million years.
The average honey bee worker makes 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
Honey bees contribute 8 to 10 billion dollars to the U.S. economy yearly.
Honey bees have four wings that are latched into pairs by hooks.
There are an estimated 200,000 beekeepers in the United States.
Honey bees are the only insects that produce food for humans.
The male honey bee, the drone, has a grandfather but no father.
The average honey bee flies between 12 and 15 miles per hour.
A honey bee flaps its wings about 12,000 times per minute.
A honey bee worker visits more than 2,000 flowers on a good day.
Honey bees communicate with one another by smell and dances. Honeybees communicate one way by doing a dance called the round dance which tells the estimate of the distance between the hive and the flowers. Honeybees also have another dance called the wagging dance that they use to say the exact distance between the hive and the flowers.There are 3 million plus honey-producing colonies in the United States.
The average summertime honey bee lives only about 28 to 35 days.
A honey bee visits between 50 and 100 flowers during one collection trip.
The honeybees live in a colony in a bee hive.
A typical healthy hive may contain up to 60,000 honey bees during peak times.
Honey bees make an average of 1,600 round trips in order to produce one ounce of honey.
Bees will travel as far as one or two miles from the hive to gather nectar.
Honey bees from a typical hive visit approximately 225,000 flowers per day.
Queen bees will lay as many as 2,000 eggs on a good day -- an average of one every 45 seconds.
A good queen bee will lay between 175,000 and 200,000 eggs per year.
The average central temperature of the brood nest is kept between 92-95 degrees Fahrenheit.
The queen bee lays many eggs. This is the first stage of a bee’s life. The worker bee takes 21 days to become an adult. The drone takes 24 and the queen takes 16 days.
Beeswax production in most hives is only about 1.5% to 2.0% of the honey yield.
Approximately eight pounds of honey is eaten by bees to produce one pound of beeswax.
The Americas have no native honey bees-early pioneers first brought them from Europe.
Honey bees pollinate approximately 25% of all the foods humans consume.
Besides honey, honey bees produce wax and propolis, gather pollen, and produce royal jelly.
A typical foraging honey bee will work herself to death in about three weeks.
Even though honey bees live for just over a month, they have very full lives. Bees are always changing jobs. A bee starts life as a cleaner - then becomes a babysiter, a builder, then a chef, a security guard and an undertaker. Later it goes outside as a food collector and scout.
Scienists have proved that honey has healing power - it actually fights bacteria.
One of the most violent species of bee is the Killer (Africanised) bee. A scienist in Brazil created them by crossing bees from Africa and Europe. But 26 killer queens escaped from his lab and they’re now spreading through the Americas, invading beehives.
Scienists have proved that honey has healing power - it actually fights bacteria.
Bees can actually tell the time because they have a body clock like ours.
The Australian Aboriginals have always been skilled honey hunters. Honey hunters used to track wild bees by sticking a bit of cockatoo fluff to a bee using tree gum and following it.
Honey bees have the second most complex language in the world.
Humans use words, but bees use dances to talk.
Honey bees won’t sting you if you leave them alone. They only sting in defence because they will die after stinging a human or large animal.
One of the most violent species of bee is the Killer (Africanised) bee. A scienist in Brazil created them by crossing bees from Africa and Europe. But 26 killer queens escaped from his lab and they’re now spreading through the Americas, invading beehives.
Bee Wolves, or Bee-killer Wasps, are wasps that catch honey bees on flowers. They paralyse them and take them
back to a nest. There, they lay eggs in the living bees. The bee-wolf larvae eats the bees!
Honeybees cannot get nectar in the winter so they must make plenty of honey to survive.
They live in all parts of the world except the Arctic and Antarctic.
Bees pollinate the same plant for several days. A honeybee pollinates crops and helps make seeds.
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