Honey Bees Work Hard to Deliver Their Sweet Gift of Honey

Today, the third saturday of August , the 18th of August is known as National Honey Bee Day. You know those little winged hard workers that belong to the bee family and produce the liquid sugary treat known as honey.

Bees travel an average of 55,000 miles to produce just one pound of honey. Throughout their journey they are gathering nectar from two million flowers. After all this week each bee will gather just around 1/2 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.

National Honey Bee Day was established in 2009 to recognize beekeepers, educate others and to promote honey production

Did You Know:
That it takes an average of 3,500 honey bees to fly 55,000 miles to make about 1 lb of honey?? It will take 10 lbs of nectar to make a lb of honey.

The variety of different flowers the bees visit helps result in a subtle, yet discernible changes in the taste of honey produced.

The life time of a honey bee is only about 40 days. During its life time about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey will be gathered

Honey bees stroke their wings an exhausting 11,400 times per minute. They communicate with each other through a form of dance.

The honey bees help farmers by pollinating fruits and veggies.

In the colony of honey bees there is only 1 queen, if extra queens become present the queens will fight to the death leaving only 1 queen that lives for 1 to 4 years. Drones are simply there to mate with the queen  A queen will mate with nearly 20 drones and only mate once in its life time. The act of mating is completed in the air. The queen will store the sperm from the drones. The stored sperm will be used for egg bearing over the length of her life.  After the drone mates with the queen its stomach will be tore off and it will die.

The queen honey bee will lay between 1000 to 3000 eggs per day. The other female bees are all worker bees. A healthy bee hive has 40,000 to 60,000 bees.

Honey bees are the only insects that produce food to be eaten by humans. Honey is the only food that has all the substances to sustain life Enzymes, vitamins and minerals are all found in honey.


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