20 Amazing Honey Bee Facts!

I think we should get ourselves some honey bee facts, after all so many healing and health-promoting opportunities for the humans begin with this little busy creature. As you read the following 20 honey bee facts, you will be so intrigued just like me by this teensy-weensy fellow’s extraordinary abilities.

1. The honey bee has been around for millions of years.

2. Honey bees, scientifically also known as Apis mellifera, are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.

3. It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

4. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.

5. Honey bees have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.

6. Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell was so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.

7. The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.

8. The average worker bee produces about half a teaspoon full of honey in her lifetime..

9. A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.

10. It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.

11. A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.

12. The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.

13. A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.

14. The queen bee can live up to 5 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day. Click here to learn more about the Honey Bee Life Cycle,

15. Larger than the worker bees, the male honey bees (also called drones), have no stinger and do no work at all. All they do is mating.

16. Each honey bee colony has a unique odour for members’ identification.

17. Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but they don’t leave the hive to help defend it.

18. It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.

19. Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing".

20. During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.

The more I learnt about honey bee facts; honey's great creator -the honey bee itself, its highly organized society, how it acts with such intricate cooperation, and the various bee products, the more I admire and respect this amazing creature. It is no wonder why sometimes the colony is called a superorganism.

"Unique among all God's creatures, only the honeybee improves the environment and preys not on any other species." ~ Royden Brown

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live?" ~ Albert Einstein

Bee Can Make You Look Foolish

Beekeeper Geoff Kipps-Bolton from San Diego believes that "no matter how many books you read..., the bees will retain the right to do something different...They have an infinite capacity to make you look foolish...they don't read the same books! Read full account in An Up-Close Look at the Bees with Geoff the Beekeeper

Take a Peek into the Heart of a Freshie in Beekeeping

Pam is from Ohio, North America. Just started keeping bees not too long ago, she was enthusiastic to share about her new found passion - "The more we read about these amazing insects, the more respect I gained for them. I go out to our hives just to watch them come in from foraging and watch the others take flight to get the nectar and pollen." Read full account in Insights into Beekeeping: An Interview with a Beekeeper

Species of Honey Bees

There are two extreme species of honey bees:

1) The Africanized Honey Bee.

2) The Bumble Bee

Common Terms in the Honey Bees World

As you collect more honey bee facts and know more about honey and its benefits, there are specific terms that you would inevitably come across, such as the following:

1) Bee Pollen

2) Bee Wax

3) Royal Jelly

4) Propolis

5) Organic Honey

6) Mead

Know more about these terms related to the Honey Bees.