23 Did You Know Facts About Bees

1. There are over 20,000 different species of bees in the world.
2. The honeybee is the most well-known bee species, and it’s also the most important for honey and beeswax production.
3. Bees have been producing honey for at least 150 million years.
4. 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.
5. The queen bee can live up to five years. She is busiest in the summer months when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!
6. Bees are excellent navigators, and they can recognize patterns and remember landmarks.
7. Bees communicate with each other by dancing. The angle, speed, and pattern of the dance can give other bees information about the direction and distance to a food source.
8. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating approximately 80% of all fruit, vegetable, and seed crops in the U.S.
9. The “buzz” that you hear when a bee is flying is the sound of their wings flapping 11,400 times per minute.
10. Bees are the only insects in the world that make food humans can eat.
11. A honeybee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
12. Bees have five eyes – two large compound eyes and three smaller ocelli eyes.
13. In the hive, bees use their honey as food all year round. There are times when bees consume most of the honey, and that’s why beekeepers often replace the honey they take from the hive with a sugar substitute, which bees can eat.
14. Only female bees have stingers, and they only sting when they feel threatened.
15. Bees don’t see color in the same way humans do. Bees can see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to us, and they use this ability to find flowers.
16. Bees are very social insects, and they live in large groups called colonies.
17. The queen bee can control the sex of the eggs she lays. The queen usually lays male (drone) eggs in larger, drone-size cells while female (worker) eggs are laid in worker-sized cells.
18. The process of honey production involves bees consuming, digesting, and regurgitating nectar.
19. A single bee colony can produce more than 100 pounds of honey per year.
20. Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are over 3,000 years old and still perfectly edible.
21. Bees have a sense of smell they use for finding food, avoiding predators, and communicating within the hive.
22. The queen bee communicates with her hive with her own special scent called pheromones.
23. The male bees in the hive are called drones, and their job is to find a queen to mate with.

Originally posted 2023-09-21 18:12:24.

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