FACTS! Honey Bees. The Natures Chain.
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee
No other insect has served the needs of man like the honey bee. For centuries, beekeepers have raised honey bees, harvesting the sweet honey they produce and relying on them to pollinate crops. Honey bees pollinate an estimated one-third of all the food crops we consume.
HONEY BEES CAN FLY AT SPEEDS OF UP TO 15 MILES PER HOUR.
That might seem fast, but in the bug world, it's actually rather slow.
Honey bees are built for short trips from flower to flower, not for long distance travel. Their tiny wings must flap about 12,000 times per minute just to keep their pollen-laden bodies aloft for the flight home.
A HONEY BEE COLONY CAN CONTAIN UP TO 60,000 BEES AT ITS PEAK.
It takes a lot of bees to get all the work done. Nurse bees care for the young, while the queen's attendant workers bathe and feed her. Guard bees stand watch at the door. Construction workers build the beeswax foundation in which the queen lays eggs and the workers store honey. Undertakers carry the dead from the hive. Foragers must bring back enough pollen and nectar to feed the entire community.
A QUEEN HONEY BEE STORES A LIFETIME SUPPLY OF SPERM.
The queen bee can live 3-4 years, but her biological clock ticks a lot faster than you might think. Just a week after emerging from her queen cell, the new queen flies from the hive to mate.
If she doesn't do so within 20 days, it's too late; she loses her ability to mate. If successful, however, she never needs to mate again. She holds the sperm in her spermatheca and uses it to fertilize eggs throughout her life.
THE QUEEN HONEY BEE LAYS UP TO 1,500 EGGS PER DAY, AND MAY LAY UP TO 1 MILLION IN HER LIFETIME.
Just 48 hours after mating, the queen begins her lifelong task of laying eggs. So prolific an egg layer is she, she can produce her own body weight in eggs in a single day. In fact, she has no time for any other chores, so attendant workers take care of all her grooming and feeding.
DRONES, THE ONLY MALE HONEY BEES, DIE IMMEDIATELY AFTER MATING.
Male honey bees serve only one purpose: they provide sperm to the queen.
About a week after emerging from their cells, the drones are ready to mate. Once they've fulfilled that purpose, they die.
HONEY BEES MAINTAIN A CONSTANT TEMPERATURE OF ABOUT 93º F WITHIN THE HIVE YEAR-ROUND.
As temperatures fall, the bees form a tight group within their hive to stay warm. Honey bee workers cluster around the queen, insulating her from the outside cold. In summer, the workers fan the air within the hive with their wings, keeping the queen and brood from overheating. You can hear the hum of all those wings beating inside the hive from several feet away.
AN INDUSTRIOUS WORKER BEE MAY VISIT 2,000 FLOWERS PER DAY.
She can't carry pollen from that many flowers at once, so she'll visit 50-100 flowers before heading home. All day long, she repeats these round trip flights to forage, which puts a lot of wear and tear on her body. A hardworking forager may live just 3 weeks.
Great article :) People tend to confuse honey bees with wasps.
Honey bees are highly needed. As you wrote, we will not survive without the bees! But wasps are just malicious creatures.
wasps are close to hornets
Yes, they are very similar
Very informative.....
I've seen many documentaries about the importance of bees. It's a shame they're disappearing for "some mysterious unknown reason" (cough Monsanto cough pesticides). In China they're pollinating plants by hand, because of that global problem! Today, I learned more about bees. Thanks for this post.