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- Bees maintain a
temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest
regardless of whether the outside temperature is 110 or -40 degrees.
- Honey bees produce
beeswax from eight paired glands on the underside of their abdomen.
- Honey bees must
consume about 17-20 pounds of honey to be able to biochemically produce
each pound of beeswax.
- Honey bees can fly
up to 14 kilometers from their nest in search of food. Usually, however,
they fly one or two miles away from their hive to forage on flowers.
- Honey bees are
entirely herbivorous when they forage for nectar and pollen but can
cannibalize their own brood when stressed.
- Worker honey bees
live for about 4 weeks in the spring or summer but up to 6 weeks during
the winter.
- Honey bees are
almost the only bees with hairy compound eyes.
- The queen may lay
600-800 or even 1,500 eggs each day during her 3 or 4 year lifetime. This
daily egg production may equal her own weight. She is constantly fed and
groomed by attendant worker bees.
- A populous colony
may contain 40,000 to 60,000 bees during the late spring or early summer.
- The brain of a
worker honey bee is about a cubic millimeter but has the densest neuropile
tissue of any animal.
- Honey is 80% sugars
and 20% water.
- Honey has been used
for millenia as a topical dressing for wounds since microbes cannot live
in it. It also produces hydrogen peroxide. Honey has even been used to
embalm bodies such as that of Alexander the Great.
- Fermented honey,
known as Mead, is the most ancient fermented beverage. The term
"honey moon" originated with the Norse practice of consuming
large quantities of Mead during the first month of a marriage.
- Honey bees fly at
15 miles per hour.
- The queen may mate
with up to 17 drones over a 1-2 day period of mating flights.
- The queen stores
the sperm from these matings in her spermatheca, thus she has a lifetime
supply and never mates again.
- A queen bee can
control the flow of sperm to fertilize an egg when she is about to lay an
egg. Honey bees have an unusual genetic sex determination system known as
haplodiploidy. Worker bees are produced from fertilized eggs and have a
full (double) set of chromosomes. The males, or drones, develop from
unfertilized eggs and are thus haploid with only a single set of chromosomes.
Provided by gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/ic/trivia.html