Fact About Bees

• Queen bees live up to four years and can sting more than once. A queen lays 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a day.
• There is only one queen bee in each hive.
• A queen bee is fed royal jelly throughout its development and life-span.
• The queen bee mates with only 15 to 20 drones at the beginning of her life. She stores sperm for the rest of her life.
• The eggs are the size of a quarter of a grain of rice.
• The life of a worker bee varies from 4 to 6 weeks in summer and 4 to 6 months in the winter.
• Worker bees can only sting once so they are reluctant to do so.
• The honey bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by humans.
• Honey bees are not native to the USA. They are European in origin, and were brought to North America by the early settlers.
• Honey bees go as far as 3.5 miles from their hives for collection of nectar.
• Honey bees can identify a flavor as sweet, sour, salty or bitter.
• A bee travels about 48,000 miles and visits about two million flowers to make a pound of honey.
• A bee needs an ounce of honey to fly around the world.
• A bee can carry its own weight in nectar and pollen and still fly.
• Bees tell each other how to get to nectar sources by doing a little dance. Researchers have created a robot bee that can communicate with real bees.
• Bees air-condition the hive in summer by bringing in water and then fanning their wings.
• Bees maintain 93 degrees Fahrenheit in the center of the winter cluster (regardless of the outside temperature).
• A bee can fly at a speed of up to 21 miles per hour.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants and that the honey bee is responsible for 80 percent of this pollination.
• The six sided hexagonal shape of the honey comb is the strongest shape per material weight.
• Male bees (drones) have no stingers. They also don't do any work except for helping the queen make eggs.
• The drone mates about 100 feet in the air and then falls dead.
• The entire population of the hive is female except for the drones.
• Drones are about 0.25% of the beehive population.
• A normal beehive can easily reach 60,000 bees.
• The average bee colony produces 50 pounds of honey per year.
• It takes 8 to 10 pounds of nectar to make one pound of honey.
• It takes 8 to 10 pounds of honey to make one pound of beeswax.
• Bees collect 66 pounds of pollen per year per hive.
• One of the first alcoholic beverages, mead, is wine made from honey.
• Honey is not advised for children below one year of age as children of that age have not built the necessary immunity to botulism which occurs naturally in honey and many other foods.