Honey and You
Amazing Facts About...
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- Honeybees are one of science's great mysteries because they have remained unchanged for 20 million years, even though the world changed around them.
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- Bees have been producing honey for at least 150 million years.
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- The domestic honeybee was not known in the Americas until Spanish, Dutch, and English settlers introduced it near the end of the 17th century.
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- Did you know that bees have 4 wings?
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- The honeybee's wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.
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- A bee flies at a rate of about 12 miles per hour.
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- As well as using sound and vibration, honeybees communicate with one another by a figure-of-eight movement at the door of the hive known as the 'Waggle Dance'
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- The queen bee is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength. She will lay between 1,000 to 1,500 eggs per day.
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- In the cold winter months, bees will leave the hive only to take a short cleansing flight. They are fastidious about the cleanliness of their hive.
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- Honeybees do not die out over the winter. They feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months and patiently wait for spring. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
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- It takes 35 pounds of honey to provide enough energy for a small colony of bees to survive the winter.
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- Honeybee colonies have unique smells that members flash like identification cards at the hive's front door. All the individual bees in a colony smell enough alike so that the guard bees can identify them.