Interesting Facts About Bees
- BEES ACTUALLY HAVE FOUR WINGS The two wings each side hook together to form one larger pair when flying and then unhook when they’re not flying.
- Almost 90% of wild plants and 75% of leading global crops depend on animal pollination. One out of every three mouthfuls of our food depends on pollinators such as bees. Crops that depend on pollination are five times more valuable than those that do not.
- Honeybees have a dance move called the ‘waggle dance’. It’s not actually a dance move at all, rather a clever way of communicating between themselves to tell their nestmates where to go to find the best source of food. It took the researchers at Sussex University two years to decode the waggle dance.
- The honey bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
- A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour, hence it would have to fly around 90,000 miles -three times around the globe – to make one pound of honey.
- It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
- Honey is 80% sugars and 20% water.
- Honey bees produce beeswax from eight paired glands on the underside of their abdomen.
- Honey bees must consume about 17-20 pounds of honey to be able to biochemically produce each pound of beeswax.
- Bees maintain a temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest regardless of whether the outside temperature is 110 or -40 degrees.
- A populous colony may contain 40,000 to 60,000 bees during the late spring or early summer.
- The queen bee lives for about 2-3 years. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs a day.
- The queen may mate with up to 17 drones over a 1-2 day period of mating.
- The queen may lay 600-800 or even 1,500 eggs each day during her 3 or 4 year lifetime. This daily egg production may equal her own weight. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees
- Worker honey bees live for about 4 weeks in the spring or summer but up to 6 months during the winter.
- The average honey bee will actually make only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
- Honey bees fly at up to 15 miles per hour
