Facts about honey bees and apiaries
Even if you're not a bee fan, those little yellow-and-black-striped insects deserve your appreciation for their efforts in making magical and delicious honey! Not only is honey great for a sweet breakfast or sweetening a cup of tea, it also has some amazing biological properties that set it apart from all other food products. Below, we list six amazing facts about bees that you won't believe!
Bees make a lot of honey:
A beehive can produce between 30 and 100 pounds of honey per year. A bee colony must collect nectar from approximately 2 million flowers and fly over 55,000 miles to produce one pound of honey. This equates to a lifetime's work for approximately 556 bees. A single honey bee visits 50–100 flowers during each foraging trip and can harvest several thousand flowers per day, making 12 or more trips, collecting pollen or nectar from a single type of flower.
Bees live on honey in winter:
Bees prepare and work hard all summer to ensure they have enough honey to sustain the hive through the winter. During the colder months, they occupy their time by gathering around the queen and shaking their bodies to fill the hive with warmth. All that shaking burns a lot of calories, so honey makes an ideal high-energy diet. And if this diet works for agile bees, it works for keeping you fit, too!
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Bees need a little honey:
On average, a honeybee produces 112 teaspoons of honey over its lifetime of just six weeks. To put that in perspective, 12 bees make one teaspoon of honey, and two teaspoons of honey is enough to power a bee's entire journey around the world.
Not all bees make honey:
Honey is made by social bees, which make honey to sustain the hive and queen through the winter. There are about 20,000 species of bees on Earth, and most bees don't make honey because they are not social bees and don't live in a hive. In fact, most bees are solitary bees. Honey bees make up a very small fraction of bees, with only eight known species. Not only that, but most bees don't dance! Something our elementary science textbooks never told us about!
Bees have been making honey for millions of years:
About 130 million years ago, flowering plants first appeared, and a few million years later, bees began producing honey. Researchers have found a fossilized honeycomb dating back about 3 million years. Meanwhile, humans have been harvesting natural sweeteners for thousands of years. An ancient cave painting discovered in Valencia, Spain, depicting a human figure removing honey from a beehive, could be as much as 15,000 years old.
Bees are a diverse food source:
Bees don't just make honey, honey. Honeybees produce a variety of products. The yellow and black striped insects provide us with royal jelly, beeswax, bee pollen, and other exotic and fun foods used by nutritionists and healthy lifestyle bloggers. Honey Bee Clever is one of the few companies offering a variety of easy-to-use, multi-format organic honeybee products to suit a variety of lifestyles, allowing you to get your sweet fix whenever and however you want.
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