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20 Amazing Honey Bee Facts!

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Published: 26May2008
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I think we should get ourselves some honey bee facts, after all so many healing and health-promoting opportunities for the humans begin with this little busy creature. As you read the following 20 honey bee facts, you will be so intrigued just like me by this teensy-weensy fellow's extraordinary abilities.

1. The honey bee has been around for 30 million years.

2. It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

3. Honey bees are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.

4. They are insects with a scientific name - Apis mellifera.

5. They have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.

6. The honeybee's wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.

7. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour, hence it would have to fly around 90,000 miles - three times around the globe - to make one pound of honey.

8. The average honey bee will actually make only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.

9. It takes about 556 workers to gather 1 pound of honey from about 2 million flowers.

10. It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world.

11. A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.

12. A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen.

13. Worker honey bees are female, live 6 to 8 weeks and do all the work.

14. The queen bee lives for about 2-3 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day. Click here to learn more about the Honey Bee Life Cycle,

15. The male honey bees are called drones, and they do no work at all, have no stinger, all they do is mating.

16. Each honey bee colony has a unique odour for members' identification.

17. Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but don't leave the hive to help defend it.

18. It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.

19. Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing".

20. During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.

Of these honey bee facts, No 19: Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing" is perhaps the most memorable. And the most incredible to me is No 2: It is the only insect that produces edible food for man! The more I learnt about honey's great creator -the honey bee itself, its highly organized society, how it acts with such intricate cooperation, and the various bee products, the more I admire and respect this amazing creature. It is no wonder why sometimes the colony is called a superorganism.

"Unique among all God's creatures, only the honeybee improves the environment and preys not on any other species." ~ Royden Brown

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live?" ~ Albert Einstein

Ruth Tan is the owner of the website Benefits of Honey at http://www.benefits-of-honey.com which is an immensely rich, quality resource on honey and its benefits, and a plethora of health-related issues.

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