FUN FACTS ABOUT HONEYBEES

We recently hosted 17 students--ranging from 5th to 9th graders--at Pualani Bee Farm for an educational tour and honey tasting. In addition to teaching these wonderfully inquisitive young people about beekeeping here at the farm, we also gave them a sheet of fun facts about honeybees, some of which are truly surprising!

• Honeybees have been around for about 100-150 million years, having evolved from predatory wasps.

• The earliest evidence of humans eating honey comes from cave paintings in Spain from about 15,000 years ago, but humans only learned to harvest honey about 8,000 years ago.

• When King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened in 1922, archaeologists found 3,000-year-old jars of honey that were still edible. As long as honey is stored airtight, it will never go bad.

• A field bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers on a single foraging trip.

• Honeybee wings beat 11,400 times per minute, producing a buzzing sound that tends to be in the key of C.

• A worker bee produces only about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her entire life.

• To produce just one pound of honey, foraging bees from a single hive must visit about 2 million flowers and fly about 55,000 miles--a distance that is about the same as flying around the earth along the equator twice,

• One third of human food is made possible by bee pollination. The honeybee is the most frequent single species of pollinator worldwide. 

  
  

• Honeybees are the only insect that produces food consumed by humans.

• Honeybees produce honey as food stores for the hive during winter. Luckily for humans, these efficient little workers produce 2-3 times more honey than they need, so we get to enjoy the tasty treat, too!

• Honey is 25% sweeter than sugar.

• Honeybees cannot swim! If they get wet, they cannot fly. If a honeybee is caught in the rain, she will hide underneath leaves until conditions are dry enough for her to fly again.

  
  

• Honeybee brains are about the size of a sesame seed.

  
  

• Honeybees can recognize human faces—so they can learn to recognize their beekeepers!

• An older bee's brain can stop aging (called reverse aging) if it takes on a younger bee's job, like becoming a nurse bee. 

• A honeybee queen can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day.

• Honeybees have 170 odorant receptors and have a sense of smell 50 times more powerful than a dog. Because of bees’ acute sense of smell, they can be trained to detect explosives, bombs, and landmines, as well as other chemicals of interest!

• Honeybee antennae have more than 300 taste receptors. 

• Honeybees can taste with their feet. The feet on their front legs have taste receptors, so when a honeybee lands on a flower, it can immediately taste the nectar to decide if it's worth collecting. These taste receptors can detect sweet, salty, and bitter flavors.

• Honeybees communicate the location and quality of food sources to others in their hive by doing a "waggle dance". They also communicate with each other by emitting pheromones, or chemical signals released into the air that guide the behavior of other bees.

  
  

• Honeybees work 24/7 to keep their hives clean, hauling out dust, hairs, and pests. Honeybees are so obsessed with cleanliness that most will leave the hive when they know it’s time to die, to avoid contaminating brood and food stocks. There are worker bees in the hive whose job is that of an undertaker, removing bees that didn’t make it outside the hive before dying.

• Bee venom is more deadly than cobra venom, but it would take more than 3,800 bee stings to kill the average human. However, if a person has an anaphylactic allergy to bee stings, a single sting can be deadly if not treated immediately.