Bee Facts

Honey Facts


  • Eating honey can help you smarter! It is the only food to contain ‘pinocembrin’ that is an antioxidant that improves brain function

  • One bee will only make 1/12 of a teaspoon on honey in its entire life

  • A bee must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey.

  • Bees fly more than once around the world to gather a pound of honey and 3 orbits for 1 Kg.

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

  • The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

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

  • To make one pound of honey, the bees in the colony must visit 2 million flowers, fly over 55,000 miles and will be the lifetime work of approximately 768 bees

  • Honey speeds the healing process and combats infections.

  • Honey contains more than 180 different substances. These include 5 enzymes, 6 different vitamins, 8 distinctive lipids, 12 minerals, 17 trace elements, 18 different acids, 18 different amino acids (proteins) 18 bioflavonoides (antioxidants), 26 aroma compounds

  • Honey is more like fruit than it is like sugar


Beeswax Facts


  • It takes 800,000 wax scales to make 1 pound of wax.

  • It takes about 8 pounds of honey to produce 1 pound of wax

  • Beeswax is a stable compound and will not rot, spoil or decay over time

  • Burning Beeswax releases negative ions and can clean the air

  • Beeswax candles burn cleaner than any other candle. In fact it was a mandate that only beeswax candle could be burned in catholic churches because they burn so cleanly

  • Pure Beeswax has over 300 individual chemical components

Pollen Facts


  • One teaspoon dose of pollen takes one bee working eight hours a day for one month to gather.

  • Each bee pollen pellet contains over two million flower pollen grains and one teaspoonful contains over 2.5 billion grains of flower pollen.


Bee Facts


  • A colony of bees can contain between 20,000 and 60,000 bees, but only one queen bee

  • A bee’s wings beat 190 times a second, that’s 11,400 times a minute!

  • It has been estimated that it would take 1,100 bee stings to produce enough venom to be fatal

  • Each colony smells different to bees, this is so they can tell where they live!

  • There are 900 cells in a bee’s brain

  • Bees have two stomachs - one stomach for eating and the other special stomach is for storing nectar collected from flowers or water so that they can carry it back to their hive.

  • Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell is so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from meters away.

  • Honey bees communicate with one another by dancing.

  • Honey bees have hair on their eyes

  • Honey bees have 5 eyes, 3 small ones on top of the head and 2 big ones in front.

  • Bees are hardwired to do certain jobs. Scout bees, which search for new sources of food, are wired for adventure. Soldier bees, discovered in 2012, work as security guards their whole life. One percent of all middle-aged bees become undertakers—a genetic brain pattern compels them to remove dead bees from the hive. But most amazingly, regular honeybees—which perform multiple jobs in their lifetime—will change their brain chemistry before taking up a new gig.

  • When aging bees do jobs usually reserved for younger members, their brain stops aging. In fact, their brain ages in reverse. (Imagine if riding a tricycle didn’t just make you feel young—it actually made your brain tick like a younger person’s.) Scientists at Arizona State University believe the discovery can help us slow the onset of dementia.

  • Honeybees make out faces the same way we do. They take parts—like eyebrows, lips, and ears—and cobble them together to make out the whole face. It’s called “configular processing,”

  • Beekeepers use smoke to calm bees when they are collecting honey or relocating a hive.

  • Honeybees are responsible for approx 80% of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops in the U.S.


Worker Bee Facts


  • Only live 35 to 45 day during the summer but can live much longer in the winter

  • Only female worker bees have wax glands and can produce wax

Drone Bee Facts


  • Male bees or drones do not have stingers