2. • The practice of beekeeping dates back at least
4,500 years.
• In ancient Egypt, people paid their taxes with
honey.
3. • The ancient Greeks minted coins with bees on
them.
• Honey lasts an incredibly long time. An explorer
who found a 2000 year old jar of honey in an
Egyptian tomb said it tasted delicious!
4. • A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a
collection trip.
• Honey bees must gather nectar from two million
flowers to make one pound of honey.
• One bee has to fly about 90,000 miles – three times
around the globe – to make one pound of honey.
5. • A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000
honey bees and one queen.
• Each honey bee colony has a unique odour for
members' identification.
6. • QUEEN: The queen can live up to five years. She
is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay
up to 2,500 eggs a day!
7. • The male honey bees (also called drones), have no
stinger and do no work at all. All they do is
mating. In fact, before winter or when food
becomes scarce, female honeybees usually force
surviving males out of the nest.
8. • Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6
weeks and do all the work.
• During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth
of a teaspoon of honey.
• Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel
threatened and they die once they sting.
9. • Honey bees are also brilliant boogiers! To share
information about the best food sources, they
perform their ‘waggle dance’.
• Honey bees are fab flyers. They fly at a speed of
around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200
times per second! Making their famous,
distinctive buzz.
10. • 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.
• Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors
• Their sense of smell is so precise that it could
differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and
tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from
metres away.
11. • It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
• Honey’s ability to attract and retain moisture means
that it has long been used as a beauty treatment. It
was part of Cleopatra’s daily beauty ritual.
• Honey is incredibly healthy and includes enzymes,
vitamins, minerals. It’s the only food that contains
“pinocembrin”, an antioxidant associated with improved
brain functioning.
