25 Amazing Honey Bee Facts - The Ultimate Guide

Fresh yellow honeycomb with honey dripping from the bottom

 

  1. Dynamite Dancers - Referred to as the "waggle dance," honey bee workers perform a series of oval shaped dances, to tell the watching bees two things about a flower patch’s location: the distance and the direction away from the hive.
  2. Sticky & Sustainable -  Honey lasts an incredibly long time. An explorer once found a 2000 year old jar of honey in an Egyptian tomb and said it tasted delicious!
  3. Brain Food -Honey is the only food that contains “pinocembrin”, an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning. Honey supports digestion, and is incredibly healthy with beneficial enzymes, vitamins, minerals.
  4. Whirlwind Wings - The bees’ buzz is the sound made by their wings which beat 11,400 times per minute.
  5. Tiny yet Mighty - About the size of a sesame seed, a bee’s brain is oval in shape and has a remarkable capacity to learn and remember things. For example, it is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.
  6. Pollen Counters ... Bees understand the idea of zero. Bees are the first invertebrate shown to understand zero. When the bees were encouraged to fly towards a platform carrying fewer shapes than another one, they seemed to recognise “no shapes” as a smaller value than “some shapes”. [1] Zero is not an easy concept to comprehend, even for us. Young children learn the number zero later than other numbers, and often have trouble identifying whether it is less than or more than 1.
  7. Frequent Flyers - A single bee would have to fly about 90,000 miles, or the equivalent to flying three times around the earth in order to make one pound of honey. Good news, the average population of a successful hive is somewhere between 30,000 to 80,000 bees, so when working together during peak season, they can make pounds of honey each week.
  8. Delicious Flowers - A teaspoon of honey weighs approximately 7 grams, or 1/666ths of a pound. Next time you have a spoonful of honey, you can relish in the fact that you are enjoying nectar from over 3000 flowers.
  9. Two Million Reasons To Love - To make one pound of honey, honey bees need to gather nectar from about two million flowers. The beauty of this is that bees are a natural extension of the flowers reproductive cycle. Without pollinators, flowers and plants wouldn't spread. Plants need bees to produce their offspring. So while you are enjoying your next jar of honey, know you are tasting the sweetness from over two million bee kisses.
  10. Pounds Of Honey - Just one bee hive can produce 60 to 100 pounds of honey each year. In its entire lifetime, an average worker bee makes only 1/12 teaspoon of honey.
  11. Singular Focus - A honey bee collector gathers pollen or nectar from a single flower species each trip. One honey bee visits 50-100 flowers during each collection trip. They typically harvest several thousand flowers each day, making 12 or more collection trips. 
  12. Fast Flyer - Honey bees can fly up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
  13. A Woman's World - A colony of bees consists of 30,000-100,000 honey bees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work. The males mate, and then die.
  14. Queen Bee - The queen is able to live up to 5 years and is the only bee in the hive which lays eggs. In the summer, she can lay up to 2500 eggs each day, this is when she is at the busiest time of the year. The strength of a hive is directly related to the productivity and health of the queen, as she starts the lifecycle of all other bees in the hive.
  15. Team Bees - When bees are busy during the most active seasons, the lifetime of a worker is between five and six weeks. Worker bees most often do just one task at a time, working without any breaks. Scouts look for flowers and plants with pollen and nectar. Once suitable sources are located, the scouts recruit additional helpers to forage with them.
  16. Workaholics - Worker bees are aptly named as they often work themselves to death. After about 500 miles of flight, they die. Nectar collectors, pollen foragers, water gatherers or propolis gatherers work with such focus at their jobs, they won't stop even to enjoy honey in front of them. 
  17. Six Months - If the bees need to last over the winter months, they may live up to four to six months in order to care for the hive when the nectar flow is almost non-existent.
  18. The Mate(r) - The male honey bee, or what Australians at a barbeque might call "mate", has a primary responsibility of mating or breeding with the queen. They are larger, and have no stinger and do no work. All they do is mate.
  19. Nibbled Nectar - The honey bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
  20. Moisture Mask - Honey’s was part of Cleopatra’s daily beauty ritual, due in part ability to its ability to attract and retain moisture.
  21. Healing Honey - The healing property of honey is due to the fact that it offers antibacterial activity, maintains a moist wound condition, and its high viscosity helps to provide a protective barrier to prevent infection. Honey has antiseptic properties and was historically used as a dressing for wounds and a first aid treatment for burns and cuts. [3]
  22. Natural Nutrition - Honey has natural fruit sugars – fructose and glucose – which are quickly digested by the body. This is one of the main reasons athletes, and sportsmen use honey to give them a natural energy boost.
  23. Millennial Makers - For over 150 million years, honey bees have been producing honey the same way.
  24. A tablespoon of honey weighs approximately 21 grams, or 5/100ths of a pound.
  25. Honey has always been highly regarded as a medicine. It is thought to help with everything from sore throats and digestive disorders to skin problems and hay fever.

Sources:

[1] - Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124 - Scarlett Howard (June, 2018)

[2] - Listing of research on bee cognition by Scarlett Howard - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1895-5409

[3] - Honey: its medicinal property and antibacterial activity - 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3609166/ (April, 2011)