The more we learn about honeybees, the more fascinating they become. They live not as individuals, but act as a super-organism and they are in every way adapted to live productive lives without wasting time, energy, or natural resources. Here are a few glimpses into their complex world.
- Of an estimated 25,000 known species of bees worldwide, only seven species are honeybees.
- Honeybees have been around making honey for about 100 million years.
- Honeybees are unique in storing honey to allow them to overwinter as a colony or to survive lean times. No other type of bee does this.
- Honeybees play a role in pollinating around 30 percent of our vegetables and fruit and 90 percent of wildflowers. Good pollination leads to better cropping, feeding not just people, but also many animals, birds, and insects.
- Honeybees evolved as tree-dwellers and still need to gather the majority of their forage from trees and shrubs rather than from garden flowers or wildflowers.
- Honeybees are vegetarians. They visit flowers to gather pollen and nectar, which they turn into honey to feed adult bees as well as to lay down as winter stores. Every year, each hive needs to gather around 110 pound of pollen and 440 pounds of nectar just to survive before any honey crop can be taken.
- All worker bees are female. Male bees, or drones, do no work in the hive; their sole purpose in life is to fertilize a queen.
- Honeybees’ antennae detect sound and vibration and give them an amazing sense of smell, allowing them to detect specific forage sources up to one mile away. They also use them like cats’ whiskers, as a physical gauge of space.
- Honeybees tend to forage within a three mile radius of their hive. They can fly farther afield, but the energy requirement to do this leads to diminishing returns for the hive. They navigate using a variety of means, including physical landmarks, the position of the sun (which their polarizing eyes allow them to see even on cloudy days) and a magnetoreceptor in their abdomen that senses the Earth’s magnetic field.
- Scout bees locate sources of forage and return to the hive with samples to share. If the samples pass muster, the scouts then communicate the source’s whereabouts by ‘waggle dancing’ the directions to their sisters.
- Honeybees have five eyes: a large compound eye on either side of their head and three small eyes, known as ocellis, on the top of their head that act as a navigation system. They see in color, but are most sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum and into ultraviolet. Hairs between the compound lenses detect wind conditions, helping them stay on course.
- An individual honeybee visits 100 or more flowers in a single foraging trip. Unlike many other pollinators, honeybees will only forage on a single type of flower on any one trip.
- Flowers give off a positive electrical charge for some time after being visited by a bee, and the bees also leave a chemical ‘footprint’. These and additional signals alert other pollinators not to bother visiting that bloom for nectar at that time.
- Honeybees will visit about two-million flowers and fly around 50,000 miles to make a one pound jar of honey.
- During their entire lifetime, a single foraging bee will collect enough nectar to make one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.
- The normal top speed of a worker bee is around 15 to 20 mph when flying to a food source and about 12 mph when returning fully laden. The ‘buzz’ that a bee makes is the sound of its wings, which beat up to 16,000 times per minute.
- Year round, the bees keep the core hive temperature at between 89-95°F. In hot weather, they dispel heat by fanning their wings. In winter, they isolate their flight muscles, using them to generate heat through ‘shivering’ without wing motion.
- In high summer, a busy hive can contain as many as 70,000 female worker bees, plus the queen, and several thousand drones. In winter, the colony will drop to around a quarter of its summer size.
- Spring- and summer-born worker bees perform a series of predetermined jobs during their five- to six-week lifespan (bees born in the autumn will live through the winter until spring). In the first three weeks of their lives, they progress from cleaning the comb and feeding larvae to receiving pollen and nectar from incoming bees. Other jobs include beeswax production. Only in the last stage of their lives do they leave the hive to work as a forager.
- Bees do not hibernate. In autumn, the female workers throw the drones out of the hive to avoid feeding them through winter. The remaining colony clusters around the queen and will fly whenever the outside temperature is above 50°F.
- Drones die in the process of mating, which takes place in flight. The queen makes just one nuptial trip in her life, during the course of which she will mate with many drones. She collects a lifetime supply of sperm, which she stores in her abdomen.
- The queen is larger than the workers and has a fertile life of three to four years. Her key function is to lay eggs, which she does mainly in the spring and early summer, peaking at the summer solstice in June, when she might be laying as many as 2,000 eggs a day. As she is unable to care for herself, attendant bees follow her around to feed her, groom her, and take away her waste.
- Every queen has her own unique pheromone ‘signature’ which is spread throughout the hive from bee to bee. Amongst their many functions, her pheromones act as a ‘password’ so that intruder bees from other hives can quickly be recognized.
Excerpted with permission from Planting For Honeybees by Sarah Wyndham Lewis, published by Quadrille March 2018
9 Comments
Honey bee is 2 words. Honey and bee. Don’t let Grammerly or other editing programs let you spell it incorrectly. Honey bee, Mason bee, bumble bee, carpenter bee.
Always like to read anything about our little friends. Thanks
Denise… If the spelling of Honey Bees in a reply is all you get from this article then you should read it again. Regardless of how you spell… or misspell a word… the bottom line is that we’re losing the little critters and that’s frightening… we need them. Your concerns should be about that not about someone who cares spells a word… That’s bullying…. that’s not cool…
Denise, If all you got from this article is the fact that someone did not spell Honey Bee correctly then you need to take a look at your priorities, unless of course, this site put you in charge of spelling and gave you the right to “bully”. No one cares a lick, other than you, about misspelling words in a thread. The content of the article and how people react to it is far more important. Chill out… your comment was geared to subject someone you don’t know to your imagined intelligence…. which inevitably showed your “lack of”…
I’ll have to differ with you n point no. 2. Both bees and humans have been around about 6000 years; having been created by God in 6 literal days.
‘Denice’, correct spelling IS important, in a thread or out.
Mr. Lubrick, there is a human grave in Labrador, where I live, that is 7000 years old.
Pollinators are in short supply on the farms in northern Canada, in fact, the importing of Honey bees to the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is forbidden This is because of mites and diseases.
Honey bees are awesome, & amazing! We really can’t live without them. We should do more to attract them,& help them.
This is a very informative article. When does the queen bee lay eggs in the tropical region since we don’t have the seasons that you have?
Thank you Denise. Honey bee. I appreciate reminders like that. I think it’s important to take care of our language. Proffered as a helpful tip and not bullying at all.