No other insect serves human needs like the honey bee. Honey bee never sleep in her life. For centuries, beekeepers have raised honey bees, harvesting the sweet honey they produce and relying on them to pollinate crops. Honey bees pollinate an estimated one-third of all the food crops we consume. Here are some facts about honey bees you might not know.
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- There are more than 20,000 kinds of bees on the earth, but only 4 of them can make honey.
- The honey bee has been around for millions of years.
- It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
- Honey bees must gather nectar from two million flowers to make one pound of honey.
- 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.
- One bee has to fly about 90,000 miles – three times around the globe – to make one pound of honey.
- 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.
- If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva (the newly hatched baby insects) and feeding it a special food called “royal jelly“. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.
- Only female bee can make honey and sting, male drones are only for the sake of mating with the queen.
- Honey bees have been producing honey in the same way for 150 million years.
- A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
- The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.
- When a bee finds a good source of nectar it flies back to the hive and shows its friends where the nectar source is by doing a dance which positions the flower in relation to the sun and hive. This is known as the ‘waggle dance.’
- 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.
- Each honey bee colony has a unique odour for members' identification.
- 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.
- Sadly, over the past 15 years, colonies of bees have been disappearing, and the reason remains unknown. Referred to as ‘colony collapse disorder’, billions of Honey bees across the world are leaving their hives, never to return. In some regions, up to 90% of bees have disappeared!
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