92 Fun Facts About Bees

How many eyes do honey bees possess?

Five: two large compound eyes build the picture, while three tiny simple eyes on top of the head register light levels and are thought to help the bee hold steady in flight.

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

Propolis, or 'bee glue', is plant resin worked with wax and saliva; bees also use it to seal up intruders too big to drag out, such as a dead mouse, so the body cannot rot inside the hive.

Roughly how long can a queen honey bee live?

A few years: three or four is common for a queen, yet many beekeepers replace her after only a year or two, before she starts to slow down.

Which color can bees see that is invisible to humans?

Ultraviolet sits at one end of a bee's colour range, which runs through blue to green and stops short of red; petal patterns invisible to us point bees to the centre of the flower.

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 her and may start laying if the colony loses its queen, but her eggs normally yield only 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 bee: males have no stinger, because a bee's sting is a modified egg-laying organ that only the females, queens and workers alike, possess.

A beekeeper's smoke calms a hive partly by masking the signal that guard bees give off to do what?

Raise the alarm: guard bees give off a pheromone, smelling of bananas, that rallies nestmates to defend the hive; smoke masks it, and also sets the bees gorging on honey as if a fire were near.

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?

Their hind legs each carry a 'pollen basket', a smooth hollow fringed with hairs; the bee brushes pollen off her body, dampens it so it sticks, and packs it in for the flight home.

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?

In tunnels in the ground or hollow stems: most solitary bees dig burrows in bare soil, which is why tilling can wipe them out, while the rest use hollow stems or beetle holes in dead wood.

A queen honey bee mates during which part of her life?

Her first weeks: she mates with many drones on a few early flights, then stores their sperm in a pouch called the spermatheca and draws on it for the rest of her life.

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.

In the busy summer season, a worker honey bee typically lives for about how long?

Six weeks is about all a summer worker gets, given the risks of daily foraging; workers raised in autumn can last several months, long enough to carry the colony through winter.

Which scientific name, Latin for 'honey-bearing bee', belongs to the western honey bee?

Apis mellifera takes its species name from the Latin for honey; an Old World native, it has been carried by beekeepers to every continent except Antarctica.

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

Karl von Frisch also showed that when the sun is hidden, bees take their compass bearing from the pattern of polarised light in the sky, which human eyes cannot detect.

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?

The distance to the food source is read from how long the waggle run lasts, the longer the farther; for food very close to the hive, the dancer switches to a simple round dance instead.

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

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

When a honey bee colony swarms, what is it doing?

Splitting in two to reproduce: the mother queen flies off with a large share of the workers to found a new nest, leaving the old one, with its comb and honey, to a daughter queen.

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 his body falls away; 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?

It is barbed: the barbs catch only in elastic skin like a mammal's, so a worker that stings another insect can usually pull her sting free and use it again.

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 Japanese honey bees kill an invading giant hornet?

They surround it and cook it with heat: hundreds of bees ball round the hornet and shiver their flight muscles until it is hotter than the hornet can survive, yet just within the bees' own limit.

Which nurse-bee secretion is fed to every honey bee larva, worker and drone alike, for its first three days?

Royal jelly goes to every larva at first; after about three days workers and drones are weaned onto pollen and honey, while a larva kept on the jelly throughout grows into a queen.

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.

Lorenzo Langstroth noticed in 1851 that bees leave a narrow gap clear, which let him design what?

Movable-frame hive: bees plug narrower gaps and build comb across wider ones, so frames hung a 'bee space' apart can be lifted out and put back without tearing the nest apart.

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

About 18% water is all that ripe honey holds, because the bees evaporate the rest in the warm hive; kept that dry, honey has an indefinite shelf life.

The honey-gathering rock painting at Cuevas de la Araña in Spain is thought to be roughly how old?

About 8,000 years is the usual estimate, though rock art is hard to date; the painting near Valencia shows a figure climbing to take honeycomb from a wild nest as bees fly around.

What does colony collapse disorder leave in a hive?

A queen with few workers: most of the adult bees vanish, hardly any dead ones are found and the food stores sit untouched; the first case was reported by a Pennsylvania beekeeper wintering in Florida.

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 bee in the world, 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 led the campaign that made 20 May the United Nations' World Bee Day?

Slovenia chose the date to honour Anton Janša, an 18th-century Slovenian pioneer of modern beekeeping whose birthday is kept on 20 May; the UN General Assembly adopted the day in December 2017.

Bumblebees make up over 250 species in which genus?

Bombus is Latin for a buzzing or humming sound; a bumblebee nest holds a few hundred bees at most, and only its new queens survive the winter, each starting a colony alone in spring.

Which sex-determination system gives male bees, hatched from unfertilised eggs, half the chromosomes of their sisters?

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.

How do honey bees at the hive entrance guide returning nestmates home?

Fanning out a scent: workers tilt up their tail ends to bare the Nasonov gland and beat their wings to spread its pheromone; beekeepers use a synthetic copy to lure swarms into empty hives.

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.

Each February, beekeepers from across the United States truck their hives to California to pollinate which crop?

Almonds: most varieties cannot set nuts with their own pollen, so growers bring in well over a million hives each winter, the largest managed pollination event in the world.

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.

Three bee hives were installed on the sacristy roof of which Paris landmark, below its rose window?

Notre-Dame's bees survived the 2019 fire because their hives sat about 30 metres below the burning roof. Fumes probably filled the hives, but the heat never reached the 63 °C at which their wax would have melted.

Zoologist Lucy King invented the beehive fence to keep which crop-raiding animals off farms?

Elephants fear bees so much that they warn each other and avoid the area once a shaken fence stirs up its hives. The fences have cut clashes with people by up to 85%, and farmers sell the honey.

Which fictional detective retires to a small farm on the Sussex Downs and takes up beekeeping?

Sherlock Holmes has made beekeeping his main occupation by the time of His Last Bow, the story in which Arthur Conan Doyle brings him out of retirement on the eve of the First World War.

Which French ruler borrowed the golden bees of King Childeric's tomb to rival the fleur-de-lis?

Napoleon wanted a symbol older than the Capetian kings' lily, so he borrowed the bees found in Childeric's 5th-century grave. Golden bees are scattered across the mantle of his imperial coat of arms.

Which New Zealand beekeeper was one of the first two climbers confirmed atop Mount Everest?

Edmund Hillary tended 1,600 hives with his father and brother, keeping bees in summer and climbing in winter. The job brought him anywhere from 12 to 100 stings a day.

Which African bird teams up with human honey-hunters, then eats the wax they leave behind?

Honeyguide birds are among the few that regularly eat wax, feasting on the grubs and comb left once people open a nest. Only one or two of the family's 16 species actually guide.

Doctors advise against giving honey to babies under one because of the risk of which illness?

Botulism can develop in infants who eat honey carrying Clostridium botulinum spores. The risk is small, but honey is only considered safe after a baby's first birthday.

Three stingless bee species of the tropical American genus Trigona stand out for feeding on what?

Rotting meat is broken down in the vulture bee's highly acidic gut, then re-secreted as a protein-rich food stored in pots for the young. That gave rise to the misnomer 'meat honey'.

In the custom of telling the bees, the Royal Beekeeper told palace hives of which monarch's death?

Elizabeth II's death was told to the hives of Buckingham Palace and Clarence House by Royal Beekeeper John Chapple. Folklore warned that uninformed bees might leave, stop making honey or die.

Which comedian voiced Barry B. Benson, a bee who sues the human race, in DreamWorks' Bee Movie?

Jerry Seinfeld also co-wrote the 2007 film, in which Barry's courtroom win backfires. With honey production halted, the bees are put out of work and the world's flowers begin to die.

Which alcoholic drink, possibly the most ancient of all, is made by fermenting honey with water?

Mead takes most of its fermentable sugar from honey rather than grapes or grain. Norse myth told of a Mead of Poetry that turned anyone who drank it into a poet or scholar.

Beekeepers calm a honey bee colony before opening the hive by puffing what from a small bellows?

Smoke masks the alarm pheromones that guard bees release, so the colony never gets the signal to attack. It also sets the bees feeding on honey, as if preparing to flee a fire.

Honey bees build wax comb from cells of which shape, which keeps the total wall length lowest?

Hexagon cells tile with no gaps while using the shortest total length of wall, so the bees spend the least wax. Worn-out comb is melted and pressed into foundation sheets with the same pattern.

Which word for a place where beehives are kept comes from the Latin for bee?

Apiary reached English by way of apiarium, the Latin for a beehouse. Beekeepers also call the site a bee yard, and its history goes back as far as beekeeping itself.

Which English city adopted the worker bee as its motif during the Industrial Revolution?

Manchester took the bee to stand for Mancunians' hard work when the city led the new age of mass production. Seven bees fly over a globe on the crest of its coat of arms.

In the Book of Judges, which strongman finds bees and honey in the carcass of a lion?

Samson ate a handful of the honey, gave some to his parents, and then turned the find into a riddle for the thirty groomsmen at his wedding feast.

In the 1991 film My Girl, which child star plays Thomas J., who dies after disturbing a beehive?

Macaulay Culkin made the film a year after Home Alone, playing a boy who is allergic to everything. He and his friend Vada knock the hive down, unaware that the bees have not left it.

Which Mesoamerican civilization kept stingless Melipona bees for honey and regarded them as sacred?

Maya beekeepers farmed the stingless bees on a large scale long before Columbus, and their descendants keep them to this day. Deforestation and Africanized honey bees now endanger the species.

Xylocopa bees, which tunnel out their nests rather than build them, are named after which trade?

Carpenter bees carry the idea in both names, since Xylocopa comes from the Greek for wood-cutter. Nearly every species burrows into dead wood, bamboo or similar hard plant material.

Which First Lady's White House garden gained a beehive whose honey went into a home-brewed ale?

Michelle Obama broke ground on the vegetable garden in 2009, and staff beekeeper Charlie Brandts looked after its hive. The harvest flavoured a beer named White House Honey Ale.

Male bees of the tribe Euglossini are named for collecting fragrances from which showy flowers?

Orchids of some groups offer no sugary reward at all and are pollinated only by these scent-gathering males. Each male keeps adding to his store of perfumes throughout his life.

Halictid bees, among the Northern Hemisphere's commonest, are named for licking what off human skin?

Sweat draws halictid bees because they want the salts dissolved in it. Most of their stings happen when someone swats one that has landed on them for a lick.

Nomada and other bees that lay their eggs in other bees' nests are named after which bird?

Cuckoo bees are easy to recognise because the females have no pollen-collecting hairs and never build a nest of their own. Several unrelated bee lineages evolved the trick separately.

Mad honey, a reddish honey with toxic and narcotic effects, comes from the flowers of which plant?

Rhododendron blossoms carry grayanotoxins, which pass into the honey and give it its kick. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder was among the first to link the poisoning to the plants.

Which premium honey comes from a tea tree that New Zealand's Māori regard as a taonga, or treasure?

Manuka honey is made by European honey bees working the tree Leptospermum scoparium. It has become a cultural emblem, given as a premium gift at ceremonies and used to promote the country abroad.

Honey bees also make honey from honeydew, a sugary secretion of which sap-feeding insects?

Aphids take in far more sugary sap than they need, and the excess is forced out as sticky droplets. Bees gather the droplets and refine them into honey just as they do with the sweet liquid of flowers.

The world's largest honey bee, up to 3 cm long, nests under cliff overhangs in which mountain range?

The Himalayas give the giant honey bee its name, and it mostly nests 2,500 to 3,000 metres up. Its very large nests hang on the southwestern faces of vertical cliffs.

Seven yellow-faced bees from which US state were the first bees on the endangered species list?

Hawaii has about 64 species of Hylaeus, the only bees native to the islands and more than all of mainland North America. Seven of them were listed as endangered in October 2016.

Which British action star plays a retired assassin tending hives in the 2024 film The Beekeeper?

Jason Statham also produced the thriller, in which a Beekeeper is a highly skilled assassin as well as a man with hives. Jeremy Irons and Josh Hutcherson co-star.

At which Jewish festival are apple slices dipped in honey to wish for a sweet new year?

Rosh Hashanah meals only gained the apples-and-honey custom in medieval times. Ashkenazi Jews also serve lekach, a honey cake, on the holiday.

Bees descend from predatory members of which insect group, hunters that preyed on other insects?

Wasps of the family Ammoplanidae, which hunted other insects, were the bees' immediate ancestors. Bees became herbivores, raising their young on pollen instead of prey.

Bees are thought to have originated on the supercontinent West Gondwana in which geological period?

Cretaceous bees arose about 124 million years ago, just before West Gondwana broke into South America and Africa. Their rapid spread is thought to have followed that of the flowering plants.

Bees belong to which insect order, shared with ants and sawflies, whose name means membrane wing?

Hymenoptera joins the Ancient Greek words for membrane and wing. Within the order, bees and ants belong to the Apocrita, a group set apart from the sawflies.

Which term describes honey bee colonies, where non-breeding workers help raise one mother's young?

Eusocial species share three traits: cooperative care of the young, overlapping generations in one colony, and a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive groups.

After about a week as a larva, a honey bee is sealed in its cell to begin which life stage?

Pupa is the third of four stages in the honey bee's complete metamorphosis, after egg and larva. Nurse bees cap the cell, so the change into an adult happens out of sight.

From about their twentieth day, worker honey bees spend the rest of their lives on which job?

Foraging comes last in a worker's career. She spends her first 10 days cleaning the hive and feeding larvae before moving on to other duties and, finally, outdoor work.

Which term names the long sucking mouthpart that a bee uses alongside its chewing mandibles?

Proboscis and mandibles give bees mouthparts adapted for both sucking and chewing. Sticky pollen packets from milkweed flowers can jam it and leave a honey bee to starve.

American foulbrood, so infectious that hives are often burned, is caused by what kind of microbe?

Bacterium Paenibacillus larvae infects young grubs through spores in their food. It multiplies in the gut until the grub dies, then reduces the body to a ropy mass.

Which pest of beehives has larvae that can also break down polyethylene plastic?

Wax moth caterpillars feed on comb, cast skins and pollen, and the damage costs beekeepers dearly. The pest is said to turn up wherever bees are kept.

Sniffer bees trained to detect explosives signal a find by which reflex, learned within minutes?

Sticking out tongues is how bees show they expect a meal: trainers pair a target smell with a sugary treat until the scent alone triggers it. TNT, Semtex and C-4 have all been detected this way.

Which Roman poet devoted the fourth book of his farming poem, the Georgics, to the life of bees?

Virgil held up the hive as a model for human society: his bees devote their labour to a king and give their lives for the community, though they lack the arts and love.

Which poet, a bee scientist's daughter, put The Bee Meeting and The Arrival of the Bee Box in Ariel?

Sylvia Plath's father Otto was a Boston University entomologist who published a book on the insects in 1934. He died when she was a child, a loss thought to have marked the rest of her life.

Which author set The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel, in the South Carolina of 1964?

Sue Monk Kidd follows 14-year-old Lily Owens, who leaves an abusive father and hitch-hikes toward a town whose name is written on the back of a Black Madonna picture.

Which Belgian playwright, later a Nobel laureate, wrote the 1901 book The Life of the Bee?

Maurice Maeterlinck was a Flemish writer working in French who won the 1911 Nobel Prize, chiefly for dramatic works with the air of fairy tales. He was made a count in 1932.

Which Anglo-Dutch thinker's The Fable of the Bees argued that private vices bring public benefits?

Bernard Mandeville imagined a hive that thrives until its bees decide to live by honesty and virtue. The idea that vice feeds prosperity caused a scandal, especially after the 1723 edition.

In the pharaohs' throne-name title of the Sedge and Bee, the bee hieroglyph stood for which region?

Lower Egypt was the bee and the south the sedge plant, so the pairing declared a pharaoh king of both lands. Den, of the First Dynasty, was the first ruler to bear such a name.

Three bees form the coat of arms of which family of Pope Urban VIII, seen on buildings across Rome?

Barberini relatives were mocked for flying from Florence to Rome like so many bees to suck the honey of the Church. Their palace, library and many altars across the city carry the three-bee badge.

Which Hindu god of love carries a sugarcane bow strung with a thread of buzzing bees?

Kamadeva shoots arrows tipped with flowers, each able to stir a particular mood of desire. In one story he sets bees buzzing around the meditating Shiva to break his focus.

Which girl's name is the Greek word for honeybee, once also a title for priestesses at Delphi?

Melissa has a twin in translation: the Hebrew name Deborah also means bee. The Greek word was itself built on the word for honey.

Which honey bee breed did Brother Adam develop at an abbey in Devon from 1919?

Buckfast bee breeding began after an epidemic wiped out the local native bees and only colonies of Italian descent survived. Brother Adam, who was born in Germany, crossed many strains to make it.