1. Using the nectar from 2 million flowers a honey bee can only make a pound (0.45kg) of honey. To do this a single honey bee would have to fly about 145,000 km.
2. Honey bees communicate through dances, vibrations and chemical signals because they cannot talk to each other.
3. The queen bee is the longest living bee in a hive, at an expected lifespan of 5 years. In summer, the queen bee lays 2,500 eggs per day.
4. Male bees are called drones and unlike the female worker bees have no purpose other than mating.
5. The buzz that a bee makes is actually the sound of their wings which beat at an astounding 12,000 times per minute.
6. Bees have been on the earth much longer than we have! Scientists believe that bees first appeared at least 65 million years ago whereas the first human ancestors appeared between 5-7 million years ago.
7. The queen can control the gender of the bees that hatch from the eggs she lays. Females are hatched by using stored sperm to fertilise the egg and unfertilised eggs hatch into males.
8. Honey is the only insect-made food eaten by man and is the only food that provides all substances needed to sustain life.
9. Bees have an incredible sense of smell due to their 170 odorant receptors. This sense is so precise that they can detect specific varieties in flowers and presence of pollen from meters away.
10. Queen bees are actually born as a standard larva, but is then fed a special jelly-like substance that causes them to develop into a queen.
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