Bees - The Facts

The bee belongs to the family of hymenoptera, (from the Greek hymen - membrane, these insects having translucent, membranous wings), like the wasp and the ant. Different bee species live all over the world, except in regions where the winter is too cold. There are many bee species, but the one we are most familiar with has the scientific name Apis mellifica or simply known as the Honey Bee.

Animals pollinate about one out of every three bites of food we eat.

Worker bees eat pollen and nectar and have a life-span of only 6 weeks.

Wax is secreted by glands of the bees that are at a particular stage of growth. Beeswax is used by the honeybee to build the honey comb. It is used by humans in drugs, cosmetics, artists' materials, furniture polish and candles.

A healthy colony of bees can produce 130 to 230 Kg of honey per year.

Honeybees are not native to Canada or the USA. They are European in origin, and were brought to North America by the early settlers.

Honey bees must tap 4 million flowers to make 1Kg of honey.

Bees gather 10 Kg nectar for 1 Kg honey.

Bees give us a lot more than just honey. They are also pollinators, they enable plants to produce foods like fruits, vegetables and nuts that we enjoy by transferring pollen from one plant or flower to the next. The wind pollinates oats, corn, and wheat, but many other plants, like apple trees, cherry trees and melon vines depend on insects such as bees, bats, and birds.

Domestic hives often have over 80,000 bees in a colony.

A bee will visit 50 to 100 flowers during one collection trip.

Bumble Bees tend to make their nests in soft fluffy materials, like old patio furniture cushions, insulation, dried up leaves they can also be found living in nests of 15 to 100 in cavities in the ground, under sheds, or other random places usually low to the ground. Bumblebees are seasonal, after summer only the queen survives, starting a new colony in the spring. They are known to defend their hive very aggressively and can sting multiple times. Like many types of bees, the bumble bee species is declining.

Bumblebee Queens spend the winter months hibernating in a protected underground over-wintering chamber called a hibernaculum. The queens are able to survive extreme cold by producing glycerol, a chemical anti-freeze. The queue for the bumblebee queen to emerge from a hibernaculum is the ground warming to a certain temperature.

Carpenter bees are often confused with bumble bees, Carpenter bees can chew through wood in a perfect circle, as if a carpenter had actually taken a drill and drilled right through. Inside the wood, they nest and lay eggs. Carpenter bees aren't known to sting at all. However, the damage they can do to wood is remarkable, so if you think you have a carpenter bee problem, make sure you get that checked out.

It is believed that the earliest fossilized bumblebee dates from the Oligocene, around 30 million years ago.

A bees mouth is made up of two powerful mandibles that are used to cut, pinch, join and shape the wax layers, knead the propolis and build the cell walls. The bee has a proboscis equipped with a sliding tongue that enables it to pump nectar from the deepest of flowers.

Mathematically, honeycomb is the second strongest structure in the world after the pyramids.

Honey bees gather nectar from flowers and store it in special stomachs used just for honey and have separate stomachs for their regular digestion. When honey bees then return to the hive where the nectar is extracted from their stomachs, via their mouths, by worker bees called house bees. The house bees then add their saliva to the nectar. The bee saliva contains enzymes that break down complex sugars into simple sugars. The house bees then expel the nectar into the honeycombs. The bees seal the honeycomb with a wax plug after the honey has cooled and some of the water has evaporated. Beekeepers harvest the honey.

All bees work...When young, they are called house bees and work in the hive doing comb construction, brood rearing, tending the queen and drones, cleaning, temperature regulation and defending the hive.

The drones have large, sturdy wings. They make up about 10% of the hives colony. They use their sturdy wings for the mating flight, then just before winter, the workers bite the wings off the drones, and kick them out of the hive since they are of no more use. They are left to die.

The few drones that do get a chance to mate with the queen are in for a dreadful surprise as they die soon after mating! This is because their sex organ is barbed, just like the worker bee’s stinger. An organ inside the queen called the “spermatheca” is the receptacle for the sperm. The queen will mate with several drones during her nuptial flight. After mating with the queen, the drone’s sex organ and a significant part of its internal anatomy is torn away, and it plummets to its death.

Royal Jelly is the powerful, milky substance that turns an ordinary bee into a Queen Bee. It is made of digested pollen and honey or nectar mixed with chemicals secreted from a gland in a nurse bees head. Royal Jelly commands premium prices rivaling imported caviar, and is used by some as a dietary supplement and fertility stimulant. Royal Jelly is loaded with all of the B vitamins.

The honey bees are almost inactive during winter and survive the cold of winter by clustering together and managing to create a temperature of 93 degrees Fahrenheit inside the hive center irrespective of the outside drop in temperature.

The honey bee has been around for 30 million years.

Scientists discovered that feeding the queen bee's diet of royal jelly to other animals had surprising results. The life span of pigs and roosters showed as much as a 30% increase. Fruit flies fed royal jelly increased in size and in rate of production. Chickens given royal jelly laid twice as many eggs, and older chickens began to lay again.

The average worker bee produces about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime of just five to six weeks. A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles; the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.

Honeybees represent a highly organized communities with various bees having very specific roles during their lifetime: e.g., nurses, guards, shoppers, housekeepers, construction workers, royal attendants, undertakers, foragers, etc.

Agriculture depends so much on the honey bee for pollination. Honey bees account for 80% of all insect pollination. Without such pollination, we would see a significant decrease in the harvest of fruits and vegetables.

Honey bees or Apis mellifera are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators. Over one third of the food we eat would not be available without the help of bees.

Honey bees communicate in 2 forms, they use pheromones, these give off a scent which passes a message to the other bees and they also use a dance called the waggle dance to lead the bees to the flowers. The the waggle dance or circular dance indicates a close food source is located close, less than 25 meters away. For more remote food sources up to 10km away, the frantic dance or figure-of-eight dance with complicated movements, indicating direction and distance to the food source. This information is collected via abdominal oscillations and vibrations. The direction is expressed in the relation to the position of the sun and the distance by the number and speed of the rotations of the dancing bee.

A honey bee's wings move exceptionally fast, at the rate of about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and can fly up to 15 miles per hour.

It would take 500 Honey bees 4 weeks to make one kilogram of honey and they will travel the equivalent of 3 orbits of the earth in distance to collect it.

Nectar as gathered by the bee contains about 70% water (Honey is about 17% water).

Bees remove the excess moisture from nectar by rapidly fanning their wings over the open cells in the hive.

Honey varies in color from white through golden to dark brown and usually the darker the color the stronger the flavor. There are many types, colors and flavors of honey, depending upon its nectar source of the bees.

Honeybees are not aggressive by nature, and will not sting unless protecting their hive from an intruder or are unduly provoked.

Bees pollinating fruits, vegetables and legumes is 10 times more valuable than honey produced. Bees being one of our natural pollinators are rapidly disappearing and each year we become more dependent on the honey bee for many of our daily foods.

Honey is one of the safest food as most harmful bacteria cannot live in honey for any length of time.

Bees have 5 eyes, two compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses on three simple eyes on the back of their heads.

Worker bees live for 6 weeks during the busy summer, and for 4-9 months during the winter months.

Amazingly enough there are more than 20,000 different species of bees throughout the world.

There are three types of honey bee in a hive:
- One queen bee who is much larger than the rest and lays the eggs.
- Worker bees who are exclusively female. They are responsible for maintaining the hive, looking after the queen, larvae and finding food.
- Drones are the male bees who cannot sting and whose only responsibility is to mate with queen.

Bees store their venom in a sac attached to their stinger and only the female bees sting. That is because the stinger, called an ovipositor, is a part of the female bee’s reproductive design. A queen bee uses her ovipositor to lay eggs as well as sting. Sterile females, also called worker bees, do not lay eggs. They just use their ovipositors to sting.

Bees can see all colors except for the color red. A bees vision and sense of smell help them locate the flowers they need to collect pollen. The pollen collected is not only a food source for bees, but some of the pollen is dropped whilst in flight, resulting in what is called "cross pollination". This important relationship between plant and bee is called symbiosis.

A single bee colony can have between 20,000 and 60,000 bees. They are a very social community with every bee having a role within the hive, whether tending the eggs, producing honeycomb or searching for food.

Only some species of bees die after stinging because their stingers are attached to their abdomen and the stingers have little barbs or hooks on them, so when this type of bee tries to fly away after stinging something, a part of the abdomen is ripped away.

Bees are able to communicate with each other and share information about the best food sources using their famous ‘waggle dance’. When the bee returns to the hive it moves in a figure-of-eight and waggles its body to indicate the direction of the food source from the hive. The bigger the waggle, the better the food!

In Autumn, colonies shrink to approximately 10,000 bees. They do not hibernate, but huddle together in the middle of the hive for warmth. They feed on the honey and pollen stored in the hive over summer.

The queen bee can live up to five years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day.

Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened or they are defending the hive. They die once they sting. Queens also have a stinger, but they do not leave the hive to help defend it.

Over the past few years bee keepers have been experiencing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) where whole hives of bees will suddenly die off for no apparent reason. The cause of CCD is, as yet, undefined, but researchers believe that it could be a combination of factors including disease, use of pesticides and environmental conditions.

Honey bees are prone to infestation by Varroa, mites that live on the backs of bees. The mite came to the UK in the 1990s after Asian honey bees were introduced for their greater honey-producing capacity. Without management of the Varroa mite by the bee keeper, entire colonies can be killed in just a few weeks.

It is believed that there are very few wild bees left in the UK with most colonies living in hives managed by bee keepers.

Honey is the ultimate in natural, unprocessed food. The only processing it goes through is extraction from the comb and filtration to remove any wax.

Honey is the only food that never goes off! Jars of still edible honey have been found in Egyptian tombs. This is a result of honey’s low water content and low pH making it unsuitable for bacteria to survive in.

A colony of bees can produce 60 pounds of honey over the course of one summer. Bee keepers will only take up to a third of this, with the rest of the stores used by the bees and their larvae themselves.

Urban bees like ours have access to a much wider variety of food sources than country bees thanks to the number of different plants in parks and gardens opposed to fields full of one or two crops. This makes their honey tastier!

Bees collect both nectar and pollen from plants and store them in their hives to feed the queen, the workers and the larvae. The nectar provides energy and the pollen is their main source of protein.

Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water. It's also the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.

A bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance traveled and foraging efficiency.

Bees from the same hive visit about 225,000 flowers per day.

Each honey bee colony has a unique odor for members' identification.

Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell is so precise that they can differentiate between hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carries pollen or nectar from meters away.

With the exception of allergy sufferers It is estimated that it would take about 1100 honey bee stings to be considered fatal.