Fun Bee Facts
- Bees fly roughly 55,000 miles to make one pound of honey. That’s 2 million flower visits!
- Each honey bee makes about 1 twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life time.
- A honeybee queen may lay as many as 1000 eggs per day while she builds her hive.
- The honey bee is the only insect that produces a food eaten by man. (Although in certain parts of the world it is not uncommon to eat whole insects. Ugh!)
- The “waggle dance” is how honeybees inform each other about new sources of pollen. This seemingly simply dance will tell the hive of the location, quantity and quality of nectar at the new pollen source.
- Smoke is often used to calm a bee colony while working in or around the hive. Honeybees can also communicate through smelly chemicals called pheromones. When one bee becomes agitated, she gives off pheromones, which other bees around her detect. Those bees also become agitated and give off more pheromones until soon enough the whole hive is angry. This is why bees swarm together and attack intruders as a group. Beekeepers use smoke while they perform maintenance on a hive to help block this chemical communication and calm the bees.
- Because of their keen sense of smell, these fuzzy little insects are currently “bee”-ing used to detect cancers, tuberculosis and diabetes.
