Honey Bee Facts

Honey bees are those type of bees, primarily distinguished by their capacity to produce and store honey in their colonial nests, which are known as bee hives. A honey bee colony can consist of around 20,000 - 60,000 honeybees and a queen bee.

Honey Bee Facts

• The honey bee, which has been around for about 30 million years, is the only insect which produces food that is consumed by human beings.
• The worker honey bees, all of which are females, have an average life span of 6 - 8 weeks. All the tedious work in a bee colony is done by these female bees.
• The worker honey bee's brain, which is only about a cubic mm, has the densest neuropile tissue among the animal species.
• The male honey bees, known as drones, do not have a sting. They don't indulge in any work in the bee colony, except mating.
• The life span of a queen bee is around 2 - 3 years, a period which is only spent in mating and laying eggs. She can lay up to 2500 eggs a day.
• The queen bee is the only sexually developed female in a bee colony, a unique characteristic which can be attributed to a special diet of royal jelly.
• The royal jelly is a milky substance made from digested pollen and honey, mixed with a chemical which is secreted from a gland in the nursing bee's head.
• Honey bees produce wax from the glands located at the underside of their abdomen. This beeswax is used by the bees to build a honey comb. Humans use this wax to prepare drugs, furniture polish, candles, etc.
• In order to produce 1 lb of wax, the honey bees have to consume around 17 to 20 lbs of honey.
• Only worker bees posses stings, which they use only when they are threatened. A honey bee can use its sting only once as it dies after it stings. Around 1100 honey bee stings are needed for a bee attack to be fatal for humans.
• The Queen bee also has a sting, but she never leaves the hive, not even to help defend it from intruders.
• Irrespective of what the temperature is outside, honey bees maintain the temperature of the bee hive between 92 and 93° F.
• A honey bee strokes its wings at a tremendous speed of 11,400 times per minute. This stroking helps to produce the unique bee buzz we get to hear when it flies.
• A honey bee can fly at the speed of 15 mph. It is also known to venture as far as 6 miles to collect nectar from flowers.
• A single colony of honey bees collect approximately 66 lbs of pollen every year. But an average honey bee gathers only 0.0288 ounces of honey in its lifetime.
• While collecting nectar, a honey bee visits approximately 50 to 100 flowers every day. It take approximately 556 worker bees to visit around 2 million flowers to gather one lb of honey.
• One of the most pure and nutritious natural food, pollen contains proteins, sugars, carbohydrates, enzymes, minerals, and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, CH and R.
• The difference in the flavor and color of honey depends on the source of the nectar.
• Microbes cannot sustain in honey, and hence it is used as medicine, especially for dressing wounds. The royal jelly is also used by humans as dietary supplement as well as fertility booster.
• Though herbivores, some species of honey bees are known to cannibalize their own brood when strained.
• Minute amount of venom is present in a honey bee sting. It most often triggers sharp pain, but can also prove to be allergic to some humans. Bee venom therapy is quite often used to cure problems like arthritis and neuralgia.

One of the most productive insect species, honey bees have provided humans with useful amenities such as honey and wax since ages. Owing to this, honey bee farming has become a flourishing business around the globe. These were just a few facts that we have found out about honey bees. There may be many more such interesting facts stored with them, only to come out sometime in the future.