More
interesting Bee facts...
- Honey bees must consume about 17-20
pounds of honey to be able to biochemically produce each pound of
beeswax.
- Honey bees can fly up to 14 kilometers
from their nest in search of food. Usually, however, they fly one or
two miles away from their hive to forage on flowers.
- Honey bees are entirely herbivorous when
they forage for nectar and pollen but can cannibalize their own
brood when stressed.
- Worker honey bees live for about 4 weeks
in the spring or summer but up to 6 weeks during the winter.
- Honey bees are almost the only bees with
hairy compound eyes.
- The queen may lay 600-800 or even 1,500
eggs each day during her 3 or 4 year lifetime. This daily egg
production may equal her own weight. She is constantly fed and
groomed by attendant worker bees.
- A populous colony may contain 40,000 to
60,000 bees during the late spring or early summer.
- The brain of a worker honey bee is about
a cubic millimeter but has the densest neuropile tissue of any
animal.
- Honey is 80% sugars and 20% water.
- Honey has been used for millenia as a
topical dressing for wounds since microbes cannot live in it. It
also produces hydrogen peroxide. Honey has even been used to embalm
bodies such as that of Alexander the Great.
- Fermented honey, known as Mead, is the
most ancient fermented beverage. The term "honey moon"
originated with the Norse practise of consumming large quantities of
Mead during the first month of a marriage.
- Honey bees fly at 15 miles per hour.
- The queen may mate with up to 17 drones
over a 1-2 day period of mating flights.
- The queen stores the sperm from these
matings in her spermatheca, thus she has a lifetime supply and never
mates again.
- A queen bee can control the flow of sperm
to fertilize an egg when she is about to lay an egg. Honey bees have
an unusual genetic sex determination system known as haplodiploidy.
Worker bees are produced from fertilized eggs and have a full
(double) set of chromosomes. The males, or drones, develop from
unfertilized eggs and are thus haploid with only a single set of
chromosomes.
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