Honey Bee Facts

In fact, honey bees are responsible for the pollination of more than 100 crops, providing 80 percent of the country’s pollination services. Without the help of honey bees in crop pollination, an estimated $15 billion in U.S. agriculture is in jeopardy affecting both U.S. and international food supplies

There are four different species of honeybee in the world:

Basic Honeybee Facts

Honeybee Castes

Additional Facts…About Honeybees

• Did you know that bees have 4 wings?
• The honeybee’s wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.
• A bee flies at a rate of about 15 miles per hour.
• How many eyes does a honeybee have? Five. Two compound and three simple.
• The queen bee is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength. She will lay about 1,500 to 2,000 eggs per day.
• In the cold winter months, bees will leave the hive only to take a short cleansing flight. They are fastidious about the cleanliness of their hive.
• Honeybees do not die out over the winter, neither do they hibernate. They feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months and patiently wait for spring. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm and vibrate the base muscles of their wings to generate heat.
• It takes 60 pounds of honey to provide enough energy for a small colony of bees to survive the winter in Indiana.
• Honeybee colonies have unique odors that members flash like identification cards at the hive’s front door. All the individual bees in a colony smell enough alike so that the guard bees can identify them.
• Honey Bees are the highest form of insect life.

Facts…About The Work of the Honeybee

• The honeybee is not born knowing how to make honey; the younger bees are taught by the more experienced ones.
• A honeybee visits between 50 and 100 flowers during one collection flight from the hive.
• In order to produce 1 pound of honey, approx. 2 million flowers must be visited.
• A hive of bees must fly 55,000 miles collectively to produce a pound of honey.
• One bee colony can produce up to 400 pounds of honey per year and 60 pounds of pollen.
• An average worker bee makes only about 1/12 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
• At the peak of the honey-gathering season, a strong, healthy hive will have a population of approximately 60,000 to 80,000 bees.
• It would take approximately 1 ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
• Honey is the primary food source for the bee. The reason honeybees are so busy collecting nectar from flowers and blossoms is to make sufficient food stores for their colony over the winter months. The nectar is converted to honey by the honeybee and stored in the wax honeycomb.
• Mathematically, honeycomb is the second strongest structure in the world after the pyramids.

Facts…About Honey and Your Health

• Honey contains vitamins and antioxidants, but is fat free, cholesterol free and sodium free!
• One antioxidant called “pinocembrin” is only found in honey.
• Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water.
• Honey has the ability to attract and absorb moisture, which makes it remarkably soothing for minor burns and helps to prevent scarring.
• Honey speeds the healing of open wounds and also combats infection.
• As recently as the First World War, honey was being mixed with cod liver oil to dress wounds on the battlefield.
• Modern science now acknowledges honey as an anti-microbial agent, which means it deters the growth of certain types of bacteria, yeast and molds.
• Honey and beeswax form the basics of many skin creams, lip-balms, and hand lotions.
• According to Dr. Paul Gold, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, “people remember things much better after they’ve consumed glucose, a form of sugar found in honey.”
• Honey is nature’s energy booster! It provides a concentrated energy source that helps prevent fatigue and can boost athletic performance.
• Recent studies have proven that athletes who took some honey before and after competing recovered more quickly than those who did not.
• Honey supplies 2 stages of energy. The glucose in honey is absorbed by the body quickly and gives an immediate energy boost. The fructose is absorbed more slowly providing sustained energy.
• Bees gather 10 lb nectar for 1 lb honey.

Cave paintings in Europe indicate that early peoples were harvesting honey 8,000 years ago. The next step in human/honeybee relations came when people started keeping bees in man-made structures rather than just going out and searching for wild hives. The ancient Egyptians were beekeepers and their methods were copied throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. They used the Western Honeybee, and that is the most widely used species today. The Eastern Honeybee was also domesticated long ago in China. The other two species of honeybee do not nest in cavities and so were not suited to being put into hives. The subject of beekeeping is beyond the scope of this web page.

More Bits of Information

• Honeybees are not native to the USA. They are European in origin, and were brought to North America by the early settlers.
• Honeybees are not aggressive by nature, and will not sting unless protecting their hive from an intruder or are unduly provoked.
• Honeybees represent a highly organized society, with various bees having very specific roles during their lifetime: e.g., nurses, guards, grocers, housekeepers, construction workers, royal attendants, undertakers, foragers, etc.
• The queen bee can live for several years. Worker bees live for 6 weeks during the busy summer, and for 4-9 month during the winter months.
• The practice of honey collection and beekeeping dates back to the stone-age, as evidenced by cave paintings.
• The honeybee hive is perennial. Although quite inactive during the winter, the honeybee survives the winter months by clustering for warmth. By self-regulating the internal temperature of the cluster, the bees maintain 93 degrees Fahrenheit in the center of the winter cluster (regardless of the outside temperature).
• Worker bees make 10 to 15 trips per day in the summer.
• Nurse bees heads exude Royal Jelly to feed larvae and the queen.
• Wax bees secrete beeswax to build hexagonal honeycomb cells.
• Modern science says it is aerodynamically impossible for bees to fly.
• An estimated 220,000 U.S. beekeepers manage 3.2 million bee hives.
• Bees are insects in the scientific order Hymenoptera as Apis mellifera.
• Honey consumption per capita in the U.S.,1.1 lbs., in Germany 9.5 lbs.
• Honey has been delighting humans for over 40 centuries. In ancient Egypt taxes were paid with honey. In early Greece and Rome honey symbolized fertility, love, and beauty. In the Bible this sublime nectar is called “the heavenly food”.
• North American Indians called honeybees “white man flies” because Colonists brought them from Europe.
• South Dakota, North Dakota, Florida, and California being the biggest honey producers.
• Utah is known as the Beehive State.
• To make honey, bees drop the collected nectar into the honeycomb and then evaporate it by fanning their wings.
• The fructose in honey makes it sweeter than sugar. At 21 calories a teaspoon it is one and a half times sweeter than sugar.
• Honey makes baked goods brown faster, and improves their shelf life.
• Honey varies in color from almost clear to very dark, depending on the floral source and it’s location, as well as the climate.
• Recently, over 21,900 species of bees have been identified throughout the world……..more than all mammals and birds combined!

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