Fun Facts About Honey Bee

Among all the insects that buzz around or crawl creepily on earth, there is one that, few know, that has been around for millions of years and is listed among the most profitable insects to the human beings – Honey Bees. Reasons are twofold. Firstly, they are the only insects to prepare food that can be directly consumed by humans i.e. honey. And secondly, they are solely responsible for pollinating one third of the total food crops of the world. Farmers rely on them for the prosperous pollination of their crops. That is not all though, for the skills they possess exceed what our imagination can hardly deem as a truth. It remains the truth nonetheless!  After going through the facts on these minute but skillful insects, it shouldn’t be a surprise that why they are respected and even worshipped in many cultures. It’s the level of hard work that they put in that has granted them this status. Continue reading to know more about interesting and amazing facts about honey bees that will surprise the hats off your head.

Fast Facts

Binomial Name: Apis
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Subclass: Pterygota
Infraclass: Neoptera
Superorder: Endopterygota
Order: Hymenoptera
Suborder: Apocrita
Family: Apidae
Subfamily: Apinae
Tribe: Apini
Genus: Apis
Sub Genus: Andreniformis, Florea, Dorsata, Cerana, Koschevnikovi, Mellifera, Nigrocincta
Average Age: 6 weeks
Average Size: 5 to 15 mm
Diet: Herbivores
Average Litter Size: 200
Natural Habitat: Sheltered Forests & Meadows
Number Of Species: 7
Origin: South and South East Asia
Found: Worldwide

Interesting & Fun Facts About Honey Bee

• A Honey Bee has 6 legs, 2 compound eyes (consisting of thousands of tiny lenses), 3 simple eyes on top of its head, 4 wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
• A Honey Bee has 170 odorant receptors when compared to fruit flies and mosquitoes, which have 62 and 79 respectively. Because of this, their sense of smell is highly developed and very precise.
• The maximum speed at which a Honey Bee can fly is fifteen miles per hour, which is quite low considering the speed at which many other insects fly.
• Ideally, Honey Bees aren’t supposed to fly at all. Their bodies are considered too big and their wingspan much smaller. But defying the laws of aerodynamics, they somehow manage to fly for maximum of 6 miles. And it takes just an ounce of honey to fuel its flight around the world.
• Honey Bees flutter their wings 12,000 times a minute just to keep their body afloat in the air. And about 200 times per second, which lends them their distinct buzzing sound.
• Honey bees are highly social insects. A major beehive can contain as much as 60000 bees. And it needs a large number of bees to keep the work of a hive going, it is almost like a big organization, with specific tasks and duties assigned to specific bees.
• Nurse bees watch over the young and the eggs, attendants of the queen bee only feed and bathe her, guard bees watch the door of the comb, undertaker bees clean the hive of the bee corpses, construction workers continuously build and repair the hive, and foragers bring pollens and nectar from flowers to feed their kin.
• Each beehive should have sufficient honey to sustain its population during winter season. An average worker honey bee can only produce one twelfth of a table spoon honey during entire span of lifetime.
• That’s why tens of thousands of bees keep working to collect nectar from the flowers with each bee visiting 50 to 100 flowers during each collection trip.
• The queen bee just needs to mate once during its lifetime to produce eggs throughout its life. She can produce as many as 1500 eggs a day to upto one million eggs in its lifetime. The eggs she lays in a single day can sometimes outweigh her.
• The queen bee mates with the drone bees, which live solely for the purpose of fertilizing the queen bee. And interestingly the mating ritual for the drones is fatal and they die within hours of mating with the queen bee.
• The queen bee can only survive in a particular temperature that is 93º F. So, the worker bees work their heads off to maintain this temperature inside the hive. In low temperatures the bees swarm around the hive to keep it warm and during high temperatures they fan in cool air to bring it down.
• They are really good architects, which is quite visible from the hives which they make, with intricate columns and sections for each type of bees. Each honey bee colony, or beehive, has a unique odour for members’ identification.
• Honey Bees are supposedly the most respected insects in almost all the cultures. Africans worship them and the Mother Nature before they extract honey from the honeycomb.
• It’s only the worker bees that sting, and that too if they feel threatened. And once they have stung, they die soon. However, a bee sting is not fatal unless one has an allergy to bee stings, and is estimated that around 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.