Everything About Bees

Learn all about bees! 

To make 454g (1lb) of honey bees need to fly 55,000 miles and visit 2 million flowers.
  
All honeybees are female.

In her lifetime a bee will make 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey and will fly the equivalent of two times around the world. 

Bees can see colour five times faster than humans which help them spot good flowers when they are flying. 

Bees wings beat at around 230 beats per second.

When they are carrying pollen or nectar bees curve their wings more to allow for the extra weight.

Bees have an amazing homing instinct and are able to make their way back to their home from miles away.

Bees pollinate as well as making honey so thanks to them, we enjoy many fruits and vegetables and they even help in ensuring cotton can grow!

Honeybees, wasps and bumble bees are all different. Honeybees are smaller and brown in colour with black strips. Wasps are bigger and are have yellow and black strips. Bumble bees are fatter and hairy and have black and yellow stripes or orange and black colouring.

Honeys taste differently depending on the flowers that the bees feed on. There are over 300 different kinds of honey all with different tastes, colours and consistency. 

A colony (family of bees) has one queen, when a second queen is reared the original queen leaves the hive and swarms with about 60% of the bees to set up a new colony. 

During the height of the summer, the colony will have about 40,000 - 60,000 bees. 

Some bees stay at the entrance to the hive during hot weather "fanning" it which helps cool it down.