Amazing Honey Bee Facts!

1. The honey bee has been around for millions of years.

2. It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

3. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.

4. Honey bees have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.

5. 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 odour recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell was so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.

6. The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.

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

8. A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.

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

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

11. The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.

12. A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.

13."Unique among all God's creatures, only the honeybee improves the environment and preys not on any other species." ~ Royden Brown

14."If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live?" ~ Albert Einstein