1. Honey Bees’ scientific name - Apis mellifera(Italian) Apis Cerana (Asian).
2. They have 2 wings, 2 eyes, and 6 legs, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
3.The honey bee has been around for 30 million years.
4- It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
5. Bees maintain a temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest regardless of whether the outside temperature is 110 or -40 degrees.
6. Honey bees are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.
7. Honey bees fly at speed of 15 miles per hour.
8. The honeybee's wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making the distinctive buzz.
9. The average honey bee will actually make only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
10. The queen may mate with up to 17 drones over a 1-2 day period of mating flights.
11. It takes about 556 workers to gather 1 pound of honey from about 2 million flowers.
12. Worker honey bees are female, live 6 to 8 weeks and do all the work.
13. The queen bee lives for about 2-3 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.
14. A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
15. Each honey bee colony has a unique odor for members’ identification. Entrance guard bees inspect incoming bees for correct hive odor and to ensure that they are bringing in food. Other bees will be rejected or attacked with soldier bees.
16. Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but don’t leave the hive to help defend it.
17. It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.
18. Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing".
19. The male honey bees are called drones, and they do no work at all, have no stinger, their sole purpose is mating with the queen during mating period.
20. During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
21. Honey bees are entirely herbivorous(feeding on plants) when they forage for nectar and pollen but can cannibalize their own brood when stressed.
22. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles. It would have to fly around 90,000 miles - three times around the globe - to make one pound of honey.
23. It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
24. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
25. Honey bees produce beeswax from eight paired glands on the underside of their abdomen.
26. The average life span of a worker bee is only 4-6 weeks
27. The queen lays an average of 1500-2000 eggs each day. This daily production may equal or exceed her own weight. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees.
28. The brain of a worker honey bee is about a cubic millimeter but has the densest neuropile tissue of any animal.
29. Honey is 80% sugars and 20% water.
30. Honey has been used for millenia as a topical dressing for wounds since microbes cannot live in it. It also produces hydrogen peroxide. Honey has even been used to embalm bodies such as that of Alexander the Great.
31. An average colony has 40,000-60,000 bees during the spring and early summer
32. Fermented honey, known as Mead, is the most ancient fermented beverage. The term "honey moon" originated with the Norse practise of consumming large quantities of Mead during the first month of a marriage.
33. Honey bees must consume about 17-20 pounds of honey to be able to biochemically produce each pound of beeswax.
34. The queen stores the sperm from these matings in her spermatheca, thus she has a lifetime supply and never mates again.
35. A queen bee can control the flow of sperm to fertilize an egg when she is about to lay an egg.
36. Worker bees-female bees are produced from fertilized eggs and have a full, double set of chromosomes. The males, or drones, develop from unfertilized eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes.
37. When a drone succeeds in mating it will soon die because the penis and associated abdominal tissues are ripped from the drone's body at sexual intercourse.
38. Drones will die off in late fall and do not reappear in the bee hive until late spring
39. The bees measure distance by the motion of images received by their eyes as they fly
