Bees are responsible for 1 out of every 3 bites of food you eat, pollinating 90 different fruits and vegetables.
​
A colony, anywhere from 30,000-80,000 bees, can pollinate an acre each day.
​
A bee’s wax-making glands are found in its abdomen.
​
A honeybee carries pollen in baskets on her back legs.
​
To suck up nectar, honey and water, the bee uses it tube-like tongue, called a proboscis.
​
The honeybee’s four wings (two on each side) flap 200 times per second - 12,000 beats per minute - which creates the buzzing.
​
A honeybee can fly 15 miles per hour.
​
A honeybee has 5 eyes – two with compound lenses and three with light sensors on the top of her head.
​
Only female bees have a barbed stinger which is ripped from their body, resulting in death, after stinging.
​
A queen may lay as many as 2,000 eggs per day. Generally, a colony only has one queen.
​
The queen takes a mating flight when she is about 3 days old, mating with as many as 20 drones. This is the only time (unless she leaves with a swarm) that she will mate and leave the hive, collecting enough sperm to fertilize eggs throughout her lifetime, usually 2-5 years.
​
A colony is made up of female bees, with only about 10% being male drones.
​
The temperature inside the hive is maintained at a constant 95 degrees F.
​
The average worker bee lives approximately 39 days.
​
During the course of her life, a worker bee progresses through different roles: house bee,
undertaker bee, comb builder, nurse bee, queen attendant, guard bee, and forager.​
​
Honeybees prefer a pristine environment. They are able to hold excrement until they can take a cleansing flight outside the hive so as not to use the hive as a “restroom.”
​
Life cycle: egg, larva, capped pupa, young bee – 21 days.
​
A honeybee visits approximately 1,500 flowers each day to gather nectar, working 50-100 flowers during each collection trip.
​
The foraging bee stores the nectar in her honey stomach.
​
House bees remove and store the nectar in wax cells when she  returns to the hive and
regurgitates it.​​

Foraging bees can travel up to 5 miles to find forage.
​
It requires 10,000 worker bees to gather a pound of honey.
​
Honeybees fly the equivalent of more than twice around the world – about 55,000 miles - to gather a pound of honey.
​
On the average, a single worker bee makes only 1/12 tsp. of honey in her lifetime
​
A honeycomb cell has six sides.
​
When building comb, honeybees tilt the cells up slightly to keep the nectar/honey from dripping out. This is so subtle that it is hard to discern with the naked eye.
​
Honeybees communicate with each other about sources of forage and good hive location by doing the “waggle dance.” The dance explains direction, distance and abundance.