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Bee Facts |
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(Click to hear "Flight of the Bumblebee") 
1. The honey bee has been around for 30 million years.
2. It is the only insect
that produces food eaten by man.
3. Honey bees are
environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.
4. They are insects with a
scientific name - Apis mellifera.
5. They have 6 legs, 2 eyes,
and 2 wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
6. The honeybee's wings
stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.
7. A honey bee can fly for
up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour, hence it would have to fly
around 90,000 miles - three times around the globe - to make one pound of
honey.
8. The average honey bee
will actually make only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
9. It takes about 556
workers to gather 1 pound of honey from about 2 million flowers.
10. It takes one ounce of
honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
11. A honey bee visits 50 to
100 flowers during a collection trip.
12. A colony of bees
consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen.
13. Worker honey bees are
female, live 6 to 8 weeks and do all the work.
14. The queen bee lives for
about 2-3 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the
summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up
to 2500 eggs per day.
15. The male honey bees are
called drones, and they do no work at all, have no stinger, all they do is
mating.
16. Each honey bee colony
has a unique odor for members’ identification.
17. Only worker bees sting,
and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a
stinger, but don’t leave the hive to help defend it.
18. It is estimated that
1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.
19. Honey bees communicate
with one another by "dancing".
20. During winter, honey
bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a
tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
"My most memorable honey bee fact is No 19: Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing". And the most incredible to me is No 2: It is the only insect that produces edible food for man!" ~*~Ruth Tan (author of Benefits of Honey Web site.) 
Source: www.benefits-of-honey.com **Another site to check out: http://www.liberty4hbees.com/htmlpages/beefacts.html 
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