14th October: Honey Bee Day

Today is Honey Bee Day, so here are some things you may not know about honey bees:

1. There are only seven species of true honey bee (members of the genus Apis), with 44 subspecies, so honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees. The study of honey bees is known as apiology.
2. Worker bees have career progression. When they are young, their job is to clean the hive and feed the larvae, but after a time they lose the ability to produce the royal jelly which the larvae eat and so they move on to building honeycombs and later to defending the hive and collecting the pollen from the forager bees. Finally, they start to fly out of the hive and become foragers themselves.
3. In winter, the bees stay in the hive and cluster around the queen to keep her warm. They produce heat by shivering and can detach their wings so that they can use the wing muscles to generate heat. The bees rotate in the cluster from outside to inside so none of them get too cold. During this time the bees eat the honey they have stored to create energy and the queen stops laying until the spring. Bees also use this technique to get rid of intruders - they cluster around them and heat them up until they die of a combination of heatstroke and carbon dioxide poisoning.
4. Bees collect both nectar and pollen from flowers - nectar to make Honey and pollen for protein.
5. A queen bee has to mate within 20 days of emerging from her queen cell or she will lose the ability to do so. She only mates once, but with multiple males (who die once they've mated). She stores all the sperm and can choose whether or not to fertilise the eggs she lays (can be as many as 2,000 a day). If she chooses to fertilize an egg it becomes a female worker; if not, it becomes a male drone.
6. Honey bees are the only bee species that swarm. A mated queen and a large number of workers will swarm to a new nest site, which some of the workers will have scouted beforehand. When they all get there, they will build the nest. In other species, the queen establishes a colony on her own, or the workers build the nest before she arrives.
7. A single honey bee worker produces about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
8. Only female bees can sting. Male drones do not have a sting, but instead have larger eyes so that they can find the queen during her mating flight.
9. Everyone knows bees do a "waggle dance" to communicate to each other where the flowers are, but they also do a "tremble dance" which lets the worker bees know they are home and ready to have their nectar collected. Some species also do a kind of Mexican wave by flicking their wings and arching their bodies, which is intended as a warning display to would-be intruders.
10. A bee can fly at up to 15 miles per hour. This is fairly slow compared to other insects, because bees are built for short flights from flower to flower.