Show Me The Honey
• At least 18% of honey is water. The bees fan it to achieve this exact percentage. The remaining 2% or less of honey is composed of a variety of trace minerals, pollen grains, flower enzymes and natural chemicals (both floral and honeybee).
• Honey is used by the bees for food all year round. There are many types, colors and flavors of honey, depending upon its nectar source. The bees make honey from the nectar they collect from flowering trees and plants.
• A single honeybee worker produces about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. To survive in the winter, the workers must produce 60 pounds of honey.
• Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water.
• Approximately 7-8 pounds of honey are consumed by bees to produce one pound of beeswax.
• A typical beehive makes more than 400 pounds of honey per year.
• Honey never spoils.
Did You Know?
• Honeybees can fly at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour. Their wings flap about 12,000 times per minute or 200 beats per second, creating the distinctive "buzz" that you hear.
• Honeybees will usually travel approximately three miles from their hive.
• It would take about one ounce of honey to fuel a honeybee's flight around the world.
• An industrious worker bee may visit 2,000 flowers per day, visiting 50-100 flowers each time before heading home to unload the pollen. A hardworking forager may live just three weeks due to all the wear and tear on her body.
• A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect one kg of honey.
Buzzy Little Bees
• Honeybees have six legs, two compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), three simple eyes on the top of the head, two pairs of wings, a nectar pouch and a stomach.
• The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has a remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.
• Honeybees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their sense of smell is so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from meters away.
• Honeybees are entirely herbivorous when they forage for nectar and pollen, but can cannibalize their own brood when stressed.
• Honeybees are responsible for approximately 80% of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops in the U.S. Without such pollination, we would see a significant decrease in the yield of fruits and vegetables.
• Honeybees are the only insect that produces food for humans.
• Honeybees are not native to the USA. They are European in origin and were brought to North America by the early settlers.
• Each honeybee colony has a unique odor for members' identification.
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