44 Fun Facts About Bees

How many eyes do honey bees possess?

Honey bees have five eyes: two large compound eyes on the sides of their head for detecting movement and color, and three smaller simple eyes (ocelli) on top of their head that help with light detection and orientation.

Which resinous bee product seals cracks and protects the hive from pathogens?

Propolis, also known as 'bee glue,' is made from plant resins mixed with beeswax and saliva. Bees use it to seal openings, smooth internal walls, and as an antimicrobial barrier against invaders and diseases.

What is the typical lifespan of a queen honey bee?

A queen typically lives 2 to 7 years; she mates only in her first weeks and rations that stored sperm for the rest of her life, and beekeepers often replace her after a year or two once laying declines.

Which color can bees see that is invisible to humans?

Bees see blue, green and ultraviolet where humans see red, green and blue; the ultraviolet patterns on flowers guide them to nectar and are invisible to us.

Which of these jobs in a honey bee colony is done by the queen rather than by the worker bees?

Laying fertilized eggs is the queen's alone; a worker is genetically no different from a queen and can even become a laying worker, but then produces only male drones.

Unlike honey bees, what is true of mason and leafcutter bees?

Every female is fertile and nests alone: mason, leafcutter and carpenter bees have no queen or worker caste, and each female builds and provisions her own nest; most bee species live this way.

Which type of bee is unable to sting?

Drone bees are male and do not possess a stinger. Only female bees, which include queen and worker bees (and bumblebee queens), are capable of stinging.

What is the purpose of the 'waggle dance' performed by honey bees?

The waggle dance is a sophisticated form of communication used by foraging honey bees to inform other bees in the hive about the direction and distance to profitable food sources.

Honey is primarily produced by bees from what substance collected from flowers?

Honey bees collect nectar, a sugary liquid produced by flowers, and convert it into honey through a process of regurgitation, enzymatic breakdown, and water evaporation.

On which part of their body do worker honey bees carry pollen back to the hive?

Worker honey bees have specialized structures called corbiculae, or 'pollen baskets,' on their hind legs, which they use to collect and carry pollen back to the hive.

From which part of their body do worker bees secrete beeswax?

Glands on their abdomen: young workers secrete the wax as thin scales from glands on the underside of the abdomen, then chew and mould the scales into honeycomb.

Where do most species of solitary bees typically build their nests?

The majority of solitary bee species are ground-nesting, digging tunnels in soil, while others are cavity-nesting, utilizing hollow plant stems, holes in wood, or other existing cavities.

On her mating flights, roughly how many males does a virgin queen honey bee mate with?

A queen mates with roughly 10-20 drones, often a dozen or more, over one or a few flights, then stores their sperm in her spermatheca to fertilise eggs for years.

In autumn, what happens to most drones in a temperate honey bee colony?

They are driven out of the hive by workers: with mating season over and winter stores to protect, workers stop feeding the drones and drag them outside, where they die.

What is the average lifespan of a worker honey bee during the busy summer months?

Summer workers live only 2 to 6 weeks, worn out by foraging; the winter generation, born when there is little to do, can survive up to 20 weeks.

The western honey bee, the species most beekeepers keep and the most common of the honey bees, has what scientific name?

Apis mellifera, Latin for 'honey-bearing' bee, is the western honey bee; its relative Apis cerana, the eastern honey bee, is the other Apis species widely kept in hives across Asia.

Which Austrian won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for decoding honey bee communication?

Karl von Frisch decoded the waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with fellow ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen.

In the waggle dance, food lying directly toward the sun is signalled by a run in which direction on the comb?

Straight upward on the vertical comb stands for the sun's direction; a run angled 30 degrees right of vertical means food 30 degrees right of the sun, and long dancers shift the angle as the sun moves.

What does the duration of a bee's waggle run encode?

For food closer than about ten metres, Italian honey bees switch to a simple round dance with no directional information.

What is stored, fermented pollen packed into comb cells called?

Bee bread is pollen packed into cells with nectar and saliva and left to ferment with lactic acid bacteria; it is the colony's protein store, eaten by workers and fed to larvae.

When a colony swarms, roughly what fraction of the adult workers leave with the old queen?

About two thirds of the workers, commonly 60-70%, leave with the old queen; the swarm departs once the daughter queen cells are capped, so the old colony is queenless only briefly.

What happens to a drone honey bee immediately after it mates with a queen in flight?

It dies: the drone's endophallus tears away inside the queen and he falls to the ground within minutes; a drone grows from an unfertilised egg and so has a mother but no father.

Which unusual feature of the worker honey bee's stinger means it often stays behind in a mammal's skin?

The barbs only catch in elastic skin, so a bee that stings another insect can usually pull free and sting again.

In which year were the first honey bee colonies shipped from England to Virginia?

1622 is when the Virginia Company's ships landed the first hives at Jamestown; the bees spread slowly westward through the colonies and reached the Pacific coast only in the 1850s, carried by settlers.

Which US state's flag and seal carry a beehive, with the honey bee as its state insect?

The beehive was a Mormon symbol of industry long before Utah became a state.

'Killer bees' descend from an African subspecies that escaped quarantine in which country?

Brazil: in 1957 African queens being bred by geneticist Warwick Kerr escaped from an experimental apiary near Rio Claro, Sao Paulo, and their hybrid descendants spread north to reach the United States by 1990.

How do some honey bees kill an invading hornet that is too big to sting?

They surround it and cook it with heat: Japanese honey bees form a 'hot defensive ball' around the hornet, raising it to about 46 °C, hotter than the hornet can survive but within the bees' own tolerance.

How long are worker and drone bee larvae fed royal jelly before being switched to other food?

Three days: all larvae get royal jelly at first, then worker and drone larvae are switched to a coarser diet of pollen and honey; the secretion comes from head glands of young nurse bees.

How many wax-producing glands does a worker honey bee have?

Each scale is about 3 mm across, and roughly 1,100 of them are needed to make a single gram of wax.

Which American clergyman's 1853 book The Hive and the Honey-bee describes his 'bee space' movable-frame hive?

Lorenzo Langstroth, a Congregational minister, patented his movable-frame hive in 1852; the 'bee space' of 6 to 9 mm is a gap bees leave open rather than fill with wax, which lets frames lift out.

Which country led world honey production in 2023, with about 24% of the total?

China led world honey output in 2023 with about 24% of the total, several times the harvest of runner-up Turkey.

Finished honey usually has a water content of around what percentage?

Bees fan the nectar down from 70 to 80% water; kept below about 18%, honey has an indefinite shelf life.

Cave paintings in Cuevas de la Araña, Spain, show humans foraging for honey at least how long ago?

At least 8,000 years: the Mesolithic rock painting at Cuevas de la Araña near Valencia shows a figure on ropes or ladders taking honeycomb from a wild nest amid flying bees.

A beekeeper from which state, overwintering in Florida, reported the first colony collapse disorder case in 2006?

Pennsylvania beekeeper Dave Hackenberg found his Florida hives emptied of adult bees in November 2006, the first reported case of colony collapse disorder; British papers nicknamed it 'Mary Celeste syndrome'.

Roughly how many known species of bee are there worldwide?

About 20,000 bee species are known worldwide, spread across seven families; only a handful are honey bees, and most species are solitary rather than colony-dwelling.

Wallace's giant bee, the largest living bee with a 63.5 mm wingspan, is found only in which country?

Indonesia: Megachile pluto lives only in the North Moluccas, where Alfred Russel Wallace collected it in 1858; presumed extinct, it was refound in 1981 and photographed alive in 2019.

The Varroa mite originally parasitised which species before jumping to Apis mellifera?

Asian honey bee (Apis cerana): Varroa lived with it for millennia doing little harm, then crossed to the western honey bee in the mid-20th century; untreated western colonies usually collapse within two or three years.

Which country proposed World Bee Day, 20 May, to the United Nations in 2017?

Slovenia proposed the day, which falls on the 1734 birthday of Anton Janša, the Slovenian pioneer of modern beekeeping; the UN General Assembly approved it in December 2017.

Bumblebees make up over 250 species in which genus?

Bombus: Latreille coined the genus name in 1802 from the Latin for a buzzing sound; bumblebee colonies are tiny next to a honey bee hive, sometimes only 50 individuals.

What is the sex-determination system in which male bees develop from unfertilised eggs?

Haplodiploidy: males are haploid, from unfertilised eggs, and females diploid, so a drone has no father and no sons, and full sisters share three quarters of their genes.

Which gland do worker bees expose and fan at the hive entrance to guide nestmates home?

The Nasonov gland, at the tip of the abdomen, releases a lemony scent of geraniol and citral; workers raise their abdomens and fan it to guide returning foragers and swarms.

Three insecticides of which class did the EU ban from all outdoor use in 2018?

Neonicotinoids: in April 2018 the EU extended its ban on clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam to all outdoor uses; low-dose exposure impairs bees' navigation and foraging rather than killing outright.

Which country led world beeswax production in 2020, with about 38% of the total?

India produced about 38% of the world's roughly 62,000 tonnes of beeswax in 2020, well ahead of Ethiopia and Argentina; the wax melts at 62 to 64 °C.

What did Charles Darwin call bumblebees in On the Origin of Species?

'Humble-bees' hung on through the 1800s before 'bumblebee', from 'bumble' meaning to buzz, won out in the twentieth century.