Top 30 Amazing Facts About Honey Bees | Amazing Facts 4U
- Amazing thing is that honeybees have remained unchanged in form or structure for 20 million years.
- Honey bees, scientifically also known as Apis mellifera, which means “honey carrying bee”, are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.
- Out of 20000 species of bees, amazingly only 4 make honey.
- In a lifetime, on average a honey bee produces 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.
- Amazingly it is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
- A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
- The amazing fact is that bees visit over 2,000 flowers and fly over 100,000 miles, the equivalent of more than three orbits around the earth to produce just 1 Kg of honey.
- It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
- A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
- 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 it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from meters away.
- Honeybees have hair on their eyes.
- Amazingly honeybees can see ultraviolet light and navigate using the sun as a compass, even when it is hidden behind clouds. They find it via the polarization of ultraviolet light from areas of blue sky.
- Each honey bee colony has an amazingly unique odor for member’s identification.
- Its wings stroke incredibly fast, at amazing 200 beats per second.
- The bee’s brain is oval in shape having the size of a sesame seed but it can amazingly learn and remember things and calculate the distances.
- Honey bees communicate with one another by dancing.
- Amazingly all worker bees are female, but they are not able to reproduce.
- Royal Jelly is the substance that turns an ordinary bee into the Queen Bee. It is made of pollen which is chewed up and mixed with a chemical secreted from a gland in the nursing bee’s heads. This “milk” or “pollen mush” is fed to all the larvae for the first two days of their lives.
- The larvae chosen to become a queen continue to eat only royal jelly. The queen grows one and a half times larger than the ordinary bee and is capable of laying up to two thousand eggs a day. The Queen Bee lives forty times longer than the bees on a regular diet. For queen bees, it takes 16 days from egg to emergence. Amazingly all female bees in a given hive are sisters.
- There is only one queen per hive. The queen is the only bee with fully developed ovaries. A queen bee can live for 3-5 years. The queen mates only once with several male (drone) bees, and will remain fertile for life. Fertilized eggs become female (worker bees) and unfertilized eggs become male (drone bees).
- When a queen bee lays the fertilized eggs that will develop into new queens, amazingly only one of the newly laid queens reigns after destroying all other queens in their cells.
- Nearly all of the bees in a hive are worker bees. A hive consists of 20,000 – 30,000 bees in the winter, and over 60,000 – 80,000 bees in the summer. The worker bees sequentially take on a series of specific chores during their lifetime: housekeeper; nursemaid; construction worker; grocer; undertaker; guard; and finally, after 21 days they become a forager collecting pollen and nectar.
- The worker bee has a barbed stinger that results in her death following stinging, therefore, she can only sting once.
- Male bees are kept on standby during the summer for mating with a virgin queen. When male bee climaxes, amazingly their testicles explode then they die. There are only 300-3000 drones in a hive.
- Before winter or when food becomes scarce, female honeybees usually force surviving males out of the nest.
- The amazing fact is that when the only queen ant dies, so does the entire colony, because no new workers are born.
- It’s amazing that worker bees will cuddle an old queen bee to death! When a queen bee is getting old or sick, the worker bees start rearing replacement queens. Once a new queen is available, the workers need to get rid of the old one. Workers will cluster tightly around the queen until she dies from overheating. This is colloquially known as cuddle death.
- Amazingly the honeybee kills more people than all the poisonous snakes combined.
- The amazing fact is that most honey bees die after it stings people as our skin is elastic, unsuitable for their stingers which are meant for harder inelastic skins. Their venom glands are also torn out in the process.
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