Six Buzzing Facts about HONEY Bees!
If you are not a fan of bees then you STING, my friend! Even if you don’t like them, those yellow and black striped little insects deserve credit for creating the magical and yummy honey! Not only is honey great for a sweet breakfast or for sweetening a cup of tea, it also has some incredible biological properties that set it apart from all other food products. Below we list six amazing facts about bees that you won’t BEE-lieve!
1. BEES MAKE A LOT OF HONEY.
A typical beehive can produce anywhere from 30 to 100 pounds of honey a year. To produce a single pound of honey, a colony of bees must collect nectar from approximately 2 million flowers and fly over 55,000 miles. This amounts to a lifetime’s worth of work for around 556 bees. As one honey bee visits 50-100 flowers during each collection trip and can harvest several thousand flowers in a day, making 12 or more trips, gathering pollen or nectar from a single floral species each.
2. BEES SURVIVE ON HONEY IN THE WINTER.
Bees prepare and work hard all summer to ensure they’ll have enough honey to sustain the hive through the winter. During the colder months, bees occupy their time by clustering themselves around the queen and shivering their bodies to fill the hive with warmth. All that shivering burns a lot of calories, so honey makes for the perfect high-energy diet and if it works for the bees, it works for you! Check out the high-energy Honey Bee Clever products for athletes here!
3. BEES NEED A LITTLE HONEY
On average, a honey bee produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey over the course of its life which is only six weeks. To put that into perspective, 12 bees make one teaspoon of honey and two teaspoons of honey would be enough to fuel a bee’s entire flight around the world.
4. NOT ALL BEES MAKE HONEY.
Honey is made by social honey-making bees to sustain the hive and the queen through the winter. There are 20,000 species of bees on earth and most bee species don’t make honey because they are not social bees and don’t live in a hive; actually, most bee species are solitary bees. only a small fraction of bees make honey. There are almost only eight known honey bee species. If that’s surprising, get this, NOT ALL BEES DANCE! Don’t tell Bee-yonce!
5. BEES HAVE MADE HONEY FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS.
Around 130 million years ago, flowering plants first appeared, and a few million years later, bees began producing honey, with one fossilized honeycomb dating from around 3 million years ago. Humans, meanwhile, have been harvesting the all-natural sweetener for thousands of years. An ancient cave painting was discovered in Valencia, Spain, that portrays a human figure removing honey from a hive, and it could date from as far back as 15,000 years ago.
6. BEES ARE A MULTIFACETED FOOD SOURCE.
It is not just honey, honey. Honey bees produce a smorgasbord of varieties of products. The yellow and black buzzing insects provide us with Royal Jelly, beeswax, bee pollen, and other interesting and exotic foods that are used by nutritionists and healthy lifestyle bloggers. Honey Bee Clever company is one of the few companies that offer all variety of organic honey bees products with easy to use and on the go packaging that allows you to have the sweet stuff whenever you want it and in the way you want it.
Do you know another surprising fact? Share it with us and let us know in the comments which one of the facts surprised you the most?
