1.
Only female honey bees can sting, the males are not able to sting, but if you are stung it will probably be by a worker. Queen honey bees can sting, but they remain close to the hive, and so a sting from a honey bee queen would be very rare.
2.
A typical honey bee colony may have around 50,000 workers.
3.
The queen honey bee is about twice the length of a worker.
4.
A honey bee queen may lay as many as 2000 – 3000 eggs per day as she establishes her colony.
5.
Drones (male honey bees) die after mating.
6.
Foraging honey bees have to fly about 55,000 miles to produce a pound of honey, visiting around 2 million flowers.
7.
Honey bees fly up to 15 mph and beat their wings 200 times per second or 12,000 beats per minute.
8.
Each honey bee makes about 1 twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life time.
9.
The antennae on honey bees are very sensitive and important for tasting things. The tips of the antennae have more than 300 taste sensors.
10.
Honey bees belong to the insect order “Hymenoptera” which they share with other bees, wasps, ants and sawflies.
11.
Honey bees eat nectar and pollen, but there are times when food is scarce, and they may eat insect secretions. They are also known to eat a little fruit, such as plums and grapes.
12.
The honey bee queen should certainly live 2 years, but may even live 3 or 4 years, whilst drones live for 55 days on average, and worker honey bees raised in the Spring may only live 6 or 7 weeks (those raised in the autumn may live 4 – 6 months).
13.
The hexagon structure of honeycombs enables bees to make super efficient use of beeswax, and guards against wastage.
14.
The “Waggle Dance” or “honey bee dance” enables worker honey bees to inform her sisters about great locations of food and water, or a new home.
15.
As with other types of bees, honey bees have 5 eyes: 3 simple eyes on top of its head, and 2 compound eyes, with numerous hexagonal facets.
16.
Honey bees are often thought of as living in wooden bee hives made by humans, but in fact a honey bee colony in the wild will naturally choose to build a nest in cavities, such as a tree hollow or cave – or around homes, they may even nest in an unused chimney.
17.
Honey bees have been around longer than humans. There is fossil evidence from 150 million years ago.
18.
The honey bee is also known as “Apis mellifera”. Apis is a very old word probably with Egyptian roots, but is also related to the Greek word for “swarm”. Mellifera means “honey-bearing” in Latin.
19.
The honey bee’s brain is about the size of a tiny grain of sugar, but researchers have found that it is surprisingly sophisticated. Specifically, honey bees can understand conceptual relationships such as “same/different” and “above/below” that rely on relationships between objects rather than simply the physical features of objects.
20.
Honey bees have been trained to act as bomb detectors. Scientists have trained honey bees to react to minute amounts of chemicals found in explosives. Trainers reward honey bees with sugar water when they correctly sense a particular explosive compound, such that the bees automatically stick out their tongues in expectation of a reward when they correctly sense the compound.
