Honey bees are one of the most amazing creatures on earth, and there is still a lot to be discovered about them.
Did you know that scientists, for many years, had no idea how a bee was able to fly given it’s mass relative to its wing power, but that’s long since been resolved.
What is special about honey bees?
Honey bees are so unique because they’re the only insect that produces a food product that humans eat. Bumblebees produce honey-like product stored as a food source only for themselves, but honey bees produce much more honey than they need to consume themselves, creating a surplus that people and animals can’t wait to get ahold of.
Why are bee facts important?
It’s important to learn interesting facts about bees because they are an essential part of our ecosystem. The more interest we can find in honey bees, and their hives, the more likely we are to preserve their hives, rather than exterminate them if they located somewhere that needs to be moved.
Bees help pollinate flowers and crops so they can produce maximum yield, and, of course, bees provide us with honey. Honey by itself contributes $4.6 million dollars each year to the Canadian economy, so cultivating an interest in honey bees in both adults and kids, allows us to continue to preserve bees place in our ecosystem and economy.
All About Honey Bees, Honey, and Beekeeping:
Facts about Canadian Honey and Bees
In all of the Canadian provinces, Ontario has the most beekeepers, with British Columbia coming in at a close second!
Saskatchewan has the most bee colonies of any province, with more than 110,000 in the most recent study by the Canadian government.
Newfoundland has the least number of beekeepers.
Bee population and hives in Canada have been continually on the increase since 2013. In the most recent government study in 2016, there were about 750,000 bee colonies in Canada.
Canada exports honey to many countries around the world. The top 3 are United States, China, and Japan.
Alberta produces more honey than any other province. Some Alberta beekeepers Saskatchewan harvest over 300 lbs (136 kg) of honey per colony.
While Canada produces 92,000 pounds of honey per year, we import an additional 1 446 232 pounds, mostly from Brazil, United States, New Zealand, and Australia. Much of this honey becomes an ingredient to be packaged and exported again.
Facts about Honey
Honey bees are the only insects that produce a food product for humans.
Honey bees harvest nectar and pollen from flowering plants, and spread pollen between plants as they are searching for nectar.
Although bears do like honey, they’re actually trying to eat the bee larvae.
Nectar is a sweet watery substance that the bees gather. After they process the nectar in their stomach they regurgitate it into the honeycomb cells. Then they fan with their wings to remove excess moisture. The final result is honey.
Honey was found in the tombs in Egypt and it was still edible! Bees have been here around 30 million years.
Honey is sweeter than sugar. A teaspoon of honey has 5 grams of sweet sugar, while a teaspoon of granulated sugar only has 4 grams of sweet sugar.
Nectar as gathered by the honey bee contains about 70% water (Honey is about 17% water).
Facts About Honey Bees
Bees have 5 eyes and 6 legs.
Honey bees fly up to 9.5 kilometers (6 miles) per day at a speed of 24 kilometers (15 miles) per hour.
A male bee in the is called a drone and he does not have a stinger.
A worker bee is always a female. They do all the different tasks needed to operate and maintain the hive.
The worker bees are all female and they do all the work for the hive. Workers look after cleaning, feeding the baby bees, feeding and taking care of the queen, packing pollen and nectar into cells, capping cells, and building honeycombs.
Bees will sometimes fan to cool the hive if it is getting too warm. Fanning is standing still, but still flapping their wings to create air movement.
A male bee in the hive is called a drone. His job in the hive is to find a queen to mate with. Male drone bees don’t have a stinger.
Honey bee wings beat up to 200 times per second.
Bees have two stomachs – one stomach is for storing nectar collected from flowers or water so that they can carry it back to their hive, and the other is for eating.
A honeybee can fly 24 km in an hour at a speed of 15 mph. Its wings beat 200 times per second or 12,000 beats per minute.
Bees have straw-like tongues called a proboscis so they can suck up liquids and also mandibles so they can chew.
Bees carry pollen on their hind legs called a pollen basket. Pollen is a source of protein for the hive and is needed to feed to the baby bees to help them grow.
A bee must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey. It requires 556 worker bees to gather a pound of honey. Bees fly more than once around the world to gather a pound of honey.
The average worker bee makes about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
Bees have 2 pairs of wings. The wings have tiny teeth so they can lock together when the bee is flying.
Bees communicate through chemical scents called pheromones and through special bee dances.
The average life of a honey bee during the working season is about three to six weeks.
It requires 556 worker bees to gather a pound of honey.
Bees are mostly attracted to bright colored flowers. Select bright color flowers when you’re planning your garden to make a fun place for honey bees to visit.
Facts about Beehives and Honeycomb
A honey bee uses honeycomb cells to raise their babies when the combs are not being used to store nectar, honey, pollen, and water.
A beehive in summer can have as many as 50,000 to 80,000 bees, but most are around 10,000-15,000 honey bees.
A single beehive can make more than 100 pounds (45 kg) of extra honey per year. The beekeeper only harvests the extra honey made by the bees.
Beeswax is produced by the bees. Bees have special glands on their stomach that secrete the wax into little wax pockets on their stomach. The bee takes the wax and chews it with her mandibles and shapes it to make honeycomb.
During peak season, a hive can produce 2-5 pounds of honey per day.
Facts about the Queen Bee
Each hive only has 1 queen bee, but every hive must have a queen!
Only the Queen in the hive lays eggs and can lay up to 1,500 eggs per day.
Queen Bees are fed an exclusive diet of royal jelly, a protein secretion stored in the head of bees which allows her to lay eggs. It’s called Royal Jelly because it is fed exclusively to the queen.
When it is time for a female bee to become the queen bee, she fights to the death with the current queen if the current queen bee hasn’t already left the hive.
The queen bee is the only honey bee whose stinger doesn’t have barbs, which means she can sting in and out repeatedly like a wasp.
A queen bee’s only responsibility is to lay eggs. All other tasks are taken care of for her. Once she stops laying eggs, the worker bees start feeding royal jelly to a young bee to raise her to be the queen and take over.
Facts about Pollination
Every 3rd mouthful of food is produced by bees pollinating crops. Flowering plants, including flowering fruits and vegetables, rely on bees for pollination so that they can produce fruit and seeds. Without bees pollinating these plants, there would not be very many fruits or vegetables to eat.
The flower where the nectar was gathered from determines the flavour and colour of the honey, and often spices are added during the packaging process, like our cinnamon honey.
Pollination occurs naturally with wind and rain, but worker bees moving from flower to flower and plant to plant increase the process of pollination.
Facts about Beekeeping (Also called Apiculture)
Beekeeping has been around more than 4500 years
There are more than 7,000 beekeepers in Canada, maintaining more than 600,000 colonies.
It takes between 15-30 hours per year to maintain a colony.
The location where bees are kept is called an apiary.
(Pictured on the right: Great Canadian Honey is a family-operated business with hive locations throughout Oxford County, Ontario!)
