10 Fun Facts About Honeybees (That Will Amaze You)
10 Fun Facts About Honeybees (That Will Amaze You)
Honeybees are fit and fast! They fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second, making that distinctive buzz we all know and love.
Females make up approximately 99% of the hive, but there is only one Queen bee per hive and she is the dominant, adult female bee, without which the rest of the colony cannot survive. A good quality queen means a strong and productive hive.
The majority of bees in a hive are worker bees. Unfertile females that do many jobs including nursing baby bees, cleaning, guarding the hive against predators and foraging outside for nectar and pollen.
Male honey bees (a.k.a. drones) serve only one purpose: to provide sperm for the queen. About a week after emerging from their cells, drones are ready to mate. After they've mated with the queen, they die.
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.
The Queen can live up to five years, but two years is the usual. She is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!
Honeybee colonies are not domesticated - they are wild creatures who have the option to abandon their hive and move house at any time, a process called absconding. The fact that colonies choose to stay in the hives provided by the beekeepers is testimony to our understanding of their requirements and that hives are built to suit the bees..
A hive is a constant 36 degrees Celsius average year-round, managed by the worker bees controlling the temperature and humidity of the hive.
Beeswax comes from eight special wax producing glands on the abdomen of a worker bee. They only produce wax for a short period as young bees. By the time they are old enough to fly as foragers their wax glands are shutting down, which makes good sense or most wax produced would be lost outside the hive while flying!
A worker bee can visit up to several thousand flowers per day, gathering nectar and pollen. But to make just one pound of honey, a hive of worker bees must travel around 55,000 miles and visit two million flowers!
