The humble honeybee
One of God’s most amazing creatures!
Honey bees may be small, but they are complex, incredible little creatures. Have you ever taken a few minutes to watch one working a flower? (Do it!) They not only gather nectar and pollen from flowers, did you know they are the main pollinators for around 75% of our crops? We would starve without these tiny crop pollinators. We also use their products in our lives continually. Honey and beeswax are two of the main products we use in our everyday lives, often without even realizing it.
We appreciate bees and their many useful gifts to us. So let’s learn a little more about them! Here’s some fun facts to help us appreciate them even more.
Did you know?
Honeybees have 5 eyes. Two compound, and three ocelli.
Most hives have somewhere between 30-80,000 bees, but only one queen.
A single bee can visit over 1,000 flowers in a single day.
Royal Jelly is a milky secretion made by worker bees and gets its name because it is food for the Queen of the hive.
All bee larvae are fed Royal Jelly for the first few days of life.
To make one pound of honey, worker bees fly up to 55,000 miles and tap up to two million flowers.
A single bee only makes approximately 1/4 tsp of honey in its lifetime.
A hive collectively flies the distance to the moon and back every single day.
A bee produces less than one flake of wax per hour.
A worker bee lives approximately one month in the summer or three months in the winter.
Honeybees fly approximately 15-20 MPH heading towards a food source but only around 12 MPH when returning with their cargo. (Pollen, nectar, etc)
If a bee egg is not fertilized it hatches into a male (drone) bee, and does not sting.
If the bee egg is fertilized it hatches into a female (worker) bee, and will sting if provoked.
You can tell a girl bee from a boy bee by looking at their booties. The girls wear pink, and the boys wear blue.
Just kidding. Keep reading.
The queen is the only female in the hive with fully functional ovaries and she will lay up to 2,000 eggs per day. That is more than her own body weight!
The eggs take three to four days to hatch into larvae.
Honeybees sleep 5-8 hours per day over the course of several short stretches (naps).
Bees beat their wings over 13,000 times per minute.
A worker bees weighs around 1/10 of a gram.
Guard bees call for help when intruders like wasps or birds approach the hive.
Bees are not harmed in any way by using their creations.
For those who are not allergic, their creations are great for our skin.
We incorporate their Wax, Raw Honey, and Royal Jelly into a variety of products.
Hope Toole January 24, 2025