Honey Bee Facts
Honey Bees, Apis Mellifera, are social insects and have a strict division of labor between the different types of bees within the colony or hive. A typical hive consists of a queen, the workers and drones.
Honey Bees have been around for about 150 million years. Honey is mentioned in the first book of the Bible. Honey was used by the Egyptians almost 6 thousand years ago, by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites and the ancient east Indians over 4 thousand years ago.
While gathering nectar and pollen, honey bees also provide pollination. It is estimated that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect pollinated plants, and that 80 percent of that pollination is done by honey bees.
The gifts from the bees include honey, pollen, pollination, beeswax, propolis, royal jelly and bee venom.
European colonists brought the honey bee with them to North America around 1638. The North American natives called them “white man’s flies”
Honey bees communicate with one another in various ways. They have a unique dance language which tells the other bees where nectar and pollen is located, including distance and direction. Bees also use smell, such as the smell of nectar, and especially pheromones, within the hive to communicate among themselves.
There is generally only 1 queen in the hive. She is the only sexually developed female in the colony and is usually the largest. She will lay, during the summer season, up to 2,000 to 3,000 eggs per day. A queen can live 3 to 5 years (or more), but is usually replaced by either the bees or the beekeeper after 1 to 3 years. In addition to laying eggs, the queen provides a variety of pheromones to maintain proper functioning of the hive. The queen is generally surrounded by a retinue of worker bees who tend to her and feed her. The queen comes from a fertilized egg and was specially raised by the bees. The egg hatches after 3 days into a larva. The workers feed a perspective queen larva much more heavily than other larvae (workers or drones) and the food is a special mixture of bee food and honey called royal jelly. About 4-5 days after hatching into a larva, the larva is sealed into its cell by the workers and becomes a pupa, spinning a cocoon around itself inside the cell. About 8 days later, for a total time of 16 days, the queen emerges. The workers will raise queens only when the hive is preparing to swarm or when the old queen is failing and the hive senses the need to have a new, stronger queen. When the queen takes her mating flight, she will get fertilized by up to 18 drones, receiving several million sperm cells, which must last her entire lifetime. Queens have a barb-less stinger, which they almost never use on humans. It is used, if at all, when she emerges from her cell, to eliminate the other queens that have not yet emerged from their cells, and thus ensure that she is the only surviving queen. Occasionally, a queen must fight a battle with another queen that has also emerged.
The workers are all sexually undeveloped females and also come from fertilized eggs. Since a queen mates with multiple drones, the workers are a collection of sisters and half-sisters. The workers do all the work both in the hive and collecting all the various substances – honey, pollen, water and propolis, that a hive needs to sustain itself. During the summer, a typical colony will have 50,000 to 60,000 workers, and as few as 5,000 to 10,000 in winter. A worker goes from egg to adult in about 21 days, and only receives light feeding during the larval stage, with a bee food slightly different from that fed to queen larvae. The lifespan of a worker bee varies according to the season and time of year. The average life expectancy is 28-35 days. Workers that are reared in the fall (September and October) and during the winter, will generally live through the winter season. An adult bee spends the first half of life doing hive chores and the last part as a forager. In the hive, workers feed the queen and the larvae, guard the hive entrance, build the honeycomb, help maintain the hive temperature at a constant 90 degrees F, store and ripen the nectar into honey, eliminate dead bees and debris, and any other housekeeping chores necessary. Workers have a barbed stinger that stays attached to the victim. When the bee pulls away, the poison sac stays with the stinger, mortally wounding the bee. The nerves and muscles attached to the poison sac continue to pump venom long after the bee is gone. This is one of the reasons it is necessary to remove the stinger immediately after being stung.
Drones are males and result from unfertilized eggs. A queen can decide whether to lay a fertilized egg (worker or queen) or an unfertilized egg (drone). Drone eggs are generally only produced from early spring through summer. The drones only purpose in life is to be available to mate with queens. They perform no other work, and are therefore expelled from the hive as winter approaches. The drones don’t even feed themselves, but make the workers feed them. Drones are larger than workers and make a louder more menacing buzzing sound, but actually are harmless since they possess no stinger.
Drones take 24 days to mature from egg to adult, and another two weeks to reach sexual maturity. Each afternoon during the summer, drones will take several mating flights lasting about 30 minutes, looking for an opportunity to inseminate a queen. A drone lucky enough to mate with a queen dies upon mating. During the summer, there are anywhere from 300 to 3,000 drones per hive, living an average of 21 to 32 days.
Swarming is a normal phenomenon of a hive and occurs during May, June and July timeframes. When the colony has built to sufficient size, a majority of the workers and the old queen leave the hive and start a new hive in a new location found by scout bees. During the preparations for swarming, the queen will lay a number (5-20) of eggs that will develop into queens and hatch after the swarm leaves the hive. Bees will often congregate on tree limbs in a large clump after leaving the old hive and before moving in to their new hive. The swarming behavior helps maintain survival of the species by increasing the total number of bee colonies.
During the winter, the bees cluster in to a large ball in the center of the hive to keep warm. Bees do not hibernate, and during the occasional break in weather will fly outside.
Honeycomb built by the bees is six sided (hexagonal), with walls measuring only .002 (two thousandths) of an inch thick, and can support 25 times its own weight.
The nectar from flowers, which is primarily liquid sucrose (unrefined sugar), is converted by the bees into honey. Nectar, pollen and water provide all of the nutritional requirements of bees. On an annual basis, a colony will collect and consume 132 to 176 pounds of honey, and 30 to 65 pounds of pollen. It will take approximately 4 million round trips to collect the nectar and another 1 million trips to collect the pollen. Depending on the flower, bees will collect both nectar and pollen on the same foraging trip.
One bee will produce approximately one-twelfth (1/12) teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime.
Bees fly over 55,000 miles just to bring you one pound of honey, and visit over two million flowers. Each bee will visit about 50-100 flowers on each flight.
There are over 300 varieties of U.S. honey, ranging in color from water white to dark black, with a different taste for each one. The average U.S. per capita consumption of honey is about 1.1 pound.
Bees make about 50-100 trips per day, just to collect water. A typical hive can use ½ to 2 ½ pints of water per day in the summer. It takes 400 bees working all day to collect 1 pint of water.
Bees fly about 15 miles per hour, have four wings and beat their wings approximately 11,400 times per minute.
A honey bee could fly around the world on about one ounce of honey.
For each pound of beeswax, 160,000 bees must travel a total of 150,000 miles pollinating flowers. The wax is secreted from special glands on the underbelly of the bees. Beeswax is used by humans in drugs, cosmetics, artists’ materials, furniture polish, candles and more.
The honey bee brain has 1 million neurons versus a humans 100 billion neurons.
Honey has been found, in edible condition, in Egyptian tombs dating back over 3300 years old.
Madame du Barry, the infamous last mistress of Louis XV, used honey for her facial masks.
Cleopatra of Egypt took frequent baths of honey and milk to maintain her youthful appearance.
Queen Anne of England used a honey and oil elixir to keep her long hair lustrous, thick and shiny.
Chinese women have a tradition of using a blend of honey and ground orange seeds to keep their skin blemish free.
