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The 'Waggle Dance' or honey bee dance enables worker bees to inform her sisters about great locations of food and water, or a new home.
Honey bees have been around longer than humans. There is fossil evidence from 150 million years ago.
Honey bees have been trained to act as bomb detectors! Scientists have trained them to react to small amounts of chemicals found in explosives.
Scientists have discovered that honey bees are able to 'vote' when making decisions about where the colony should create a new nest site.
Bees understand relationships (same/different & above/below) which rely on relationships between objects rather than physical features of objects.
Honey bees are most active between 60 - 100 F, although they can forage in temperatures as low as 55 F.
Honey bees have 5 eyes: 3 simple eyes on top of its head, and 2 compound eyes, with numerous hexagonal facets.
Honey bees cannot see the colour red. However, they may visit red flowers because they are able to see the U.V. patterns in the flowers. But they love lavendar.
Queen: Lives 2 - 4 years
Drones: Lives 4 - 6 months
Workers: Lives 6 - 7 weeks
The honey bee is the only insect that produces a food eaten by man.
Each honey bee makes about 1 twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life time.
Honey bees fly up to 15 mph and beat their wings 2000 times per second or 12,000 beats per minute!
Foraging bees have to fly about 55,000 miles to produce a pound of honey, visiting around 2 million flowers.
Once honey bee eggs hatch into worker larvae, they'll be fed around 1,300 times per day.
Drones (male honey bees) live to mate. However only one in a thousand ever mate with the queen. And those that do, die.
Honey bees communicate through pheromones passed on through feeding, called trophallaxis.
A honey bee queen may lay as many as 1000 eggs per day as she establishes her colony.
The queen honey bee is about twice the length of a worker.
Male honey bees (drones) have no father, but they do have a grandfather!
A typical honey bee colony may have around 50,000 workers.
If the Queen Bee is removed from the hive, the rest of the colony knows about it within 15 minues!
Only female worker honey bees can sting, the drones are not able to sting. The Queen can sting, but she remains close to the hive, so very rare.
