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THE PRESCOTT BEE CLUB
Honey Bee Facts and Trivia
Bees are responsible for 1 out of every 3 bites of food you eat, pollinating 90 different fruits and vegetables.
A colony, anywhere from 30,000-80,000 bees, can pollinate an acre each day.
A bee’s wax-making glands are found in its abdomen.
A honeybee carries pollen in baskets on her back legs.
To suck up nectar, honey and water, the bee uses it tube-like tongue, called a proboscis.
The honeybee’s four wings (two on each side) flap 200 times per second - 12,000 beats per minute - which creates the buzzing.
A honeybee can fly 15 miles per hour.
A honeybee has 5 eyes – two with compound lenses and three with light sensors on the top of her head.
Only female bees have a barbed stinger which is ripped from their body, resulting in death, after stinging.
A queen may lay as many as 2,000 eggs per day. Generally, a colony only has one queen.
The queen takes a mating flight when she is about 3 days old, mating with as many as 20 drones. This is the only time (unless she leaves with a swarm) that she will mate and leave the hive, collecting enough sperm to fertilize eggs throughout her lifetime, usually 2-5 years.
A colony is made up of female bees, with only about 10% being male drones.
The temperature inside the hive is maintained at a constant 95 degrees F.
The average worker bee lives approximately 39 days.
During the course of her life, a worker bee progresses through different roles: house bee,
undertaker bee, comb builder, nurse bee, queen attendant, guard bee, and forager.
Honeybees prefer a pristine environment. They are able to hold excrement until they can take a cleansing flight outside the hive so as not to use the hive as a “restroom.”
Life cycle: egg, larva, capped pupa, young bee – 21 days.
A honeybee visits approximately 1,500 flowers each day to gather nectar, working 50-100 flowers during each collection trip.
The foraging bee stores the nectar in her honey stomach.
House bees remove and store the nectar in wax cells when she returns to the hive and
regurgitates it.
Foraging bees can travel up to 5 miles to find forage.
It requires 10,000 worker bees to gather a pound of honey.
Honeybees fly the equivalent of more than twice around the world – about 55,000 miles - to gather a pound of honey.
On the average, a single worker bee makes only 1/12 tsp. of honey in her lifetime
A honeycomb cell has six sides.
When building comb, honeybees tilt the cells up slightly to keep the nectar/honey from dripping out. This is so subtle that it is hard to discern with the naked eye.
Honeybees communicate with each other about sources of forage and good hive location by doing the “waggle dance.” The dance explains direction, distance and abundance.
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