Interesting BEE facts
Fun Facts about Honey Bees
- Bees are the only insect in the world that make food that people can eat
- Honey contains all of the substances needed to sustain life, including enzymes, water, minerals and vitamins
- Eating honey can help you smarter! It is the only food to contain ‘pinocembrin’ that is an antioxidant that improves brain function
- One bee will only make 1/12 of a teaspoon on honey in its entire life
- Many plants rely on insects like bees in order to be pollinated; which is why they provide nectar to say thanks
- A colony of bees can contain between 20,000 and 60,000 bees, but only one queen bee
- A bee’s wings beat 190 times a second, that’s 11,400 times a minute!
- Worker bees, who are all female, are the only ones who will attack you, and only if they feel threatened
- It has been estimated that it would take 1,100 bee stings to produce enough venom to be fatal
- Each colony smells different to bees, this is so they can tell where they live!
- It would take 1,100 bees to make 1kg of honey and they would have to visit 4 million flowers
- There are 900 cells in a bee’s brain
- The queen bee will lay around 1,500 eggs a day
- Bees have two separate stomachs; one for food and another just for nectar
- Honey has natural preservatives so that it won’t go bad
- A third of all the plants we eat have been pollinated by bees
- Bees have been around for more than 30 million years
- Bees communicate by smells called ‘pheromones’ and by performing special ‘dances’
- Bee keepers only take the honey that the bees do not need, but this can be as much as 45kg from one hive!
- There are lots of different types of honey which taste different depending on the flowers used to make it
