When we go on walks we often pass this sign that is somehow simultaneously happy and depressing. It says, “Fun Facts About Honey Bees,” but it’s always empty.

It’s happy because, yeah, honey bees are pretty fun. But, I wonder if the person who used to put out the fun facts just got too discouraged to keep it up.

I wouldn’t mind knowing a fact or two about honey bees when I’m out on a walk. The sign itself is bright and just kind of makes you feel good. I also like the randomness of it. A more motivated person should build a similar sign next to it that says, “Fun Facts About Llamas,” just to see if we can start a movement.

Maybe someone used to stand out there and wait for people to walk by so they could tell them facts about honey bees. “Hey, man. Can I interest you in a honey bee fact? Honey bees have to gather nectar from two million flowers just to make one pound of honey.”

“Okay.”

Eventually this hero probably got tired of standing there and decided it would be better to just print out flyers. So, there’s a lot to be happy about in this whole situation.

The box, though, it’s ALWAYS empty. It’s possible we just have the worst luck and the flyers are always gone by the time we go for our evening walk. That could be, I guess. Maybe there’s an unquenchable thirst for honey bee facts in the area and I’m totally out of the loop.

Anyway, for reasons not quite entirely known by me, I decided to take action. Without further rambling, here’s some fun facts about honey bees. And, actually, just honey and bees in general.

37 Fun Facts About Honey Bees

1. Honey bees are the teddy bears of the bee world, but they are not soft and cuddly. Don’t try to cuddle one. BUT, if you HAD to cuddle a bee, I would suggest the honey bee. Don’t worry the facts get better.
2. Honey bees can only sting you once, so if you get stung by one, you probably deserved it.
3. That buzzing sound you hear is made from the bees wings beating 11,400 times per minutes.  That’s 190 times every second. That’s too many times.
4. Honey was part of Cleopatra’s daily beauty routine because of its ability to attract and retain moisture.
5. Hornets, wasps and yellow jackets are all part of the Vespidae family, and are not bees. Hornets are subsets of the wasp family. They are generally fatter than your standard wasp. None of them are honey bees, so let’s move on.
6. The queen bee lives up to half a decade long and lays up to 2,500 eggs per day during the summer months. She’s also the only bee that can lay eggs. Lot of pressure.
7. A honey bee will visit up to 100 flowers during a pollen collecting trip.
8. Honey bees can fly up to six miles until they get tuckered out.
9. They can fly up to 15 miles per hour, which seems like it’s not that fast.
10. One honey bee has to fly about 90,000 miles to make a pound of honey. It would take a bee 6,000 hours to do that if they never stopped. That’s 250 days. Luckily they die well before they fly that far.
11. The worker honey bees are all female.
12. Worker honey bees born in the summer live for about six weeks, whereas worker honey bees born in the fall live four to six months. That’s legitimately fascinating.
13. The average honey bee only makes 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. That’s really sad and adorable.
14. Male honey bees (called drones) don’t do anything besides mate. They don’t make any honey. They don’t even have a stinger. It’s a rough life.
15. Technically, female honey bees only make 1/12th of a teaspoon more honey in their lifetime than male honey bees. I bet if I started out with this fact you wouldn’t feel like the division of labor is all that much to get up in arms about. After you read the previous two facts, this one seems misleading.
16. There’s a lot of toxic masculinity going on in the honey bee community it would seem.
17. Don’t worry, feminists. When the hive goes into survival mode in the fall and winter, they kick all the male bees out. Boom. Take that patriarchy.
18. Honey bees communicate with each other by dancing around. That’s pretty cute.
19. A colony of bees consists of up to 80,000 honey bees and one queen.
20. If the queen dies, the hive will feed a new larvae, a special food called ‘Royal Jelly’, which uses dark magic and possibly science to turn the regular honey bee into a new queen. It’s kind of like when Daenerys Targaryen ate that heart in season one of Game of Thrones.
21. You can put honey on bread and eat it as long as your wife lets you buy bread.  Not all these facts are very informative, but they’re all fun.
22. Honey bee brains are oval and about the size of a sesame seed. Despite their tiny and misshapen brains, they can make complex calculations about distance traveled and the most efficient way to get pollen.
23. Each bee has 170 odorant receptors. That seems like too many, but what do I know.
24. Honey bees are dying at a rapid rate, and it’s probably your fault. Scientists are worried honey bees may soon go extinct if we don’t stop polluting willy-nilly. What do scientists know anyway? They’re always trying to get us to save our own planet for future generations. How can we trust them when their agenda is so convoluted?
25. Honey is regarded as a medicine. It helps sore throats, digestive disorders, hay fever, skin problems and even makes corn flakes cereal tolerable.
26. You can use honey for some quick energy because the natural fruit sugars- fructose and glucose- are easily digested by the body.
27. Honey bees have been producing honey in the same way for 150 million years. I don’t know if I believe that. How did they produce honey 153 million years ago? It kind of makes people’s boasts that they’ve been doing something the same way for 150 years seem not that impressive.
28. Honey basically just lasts forever. A rude explorer ate some he found in a 2,000 year old Egyptian tomb. He said it was pretty good. I don’t know, seems kind of irresponsible on his part.
29. Bees communicate where a good source of nectar is by doing what’s called the ‘waggle dance,’ which positions the flower in relation to the hive and the sun. I see why the men don’t gather honey. Men are awful at following directions and finding things. I can’t find things in the fridge that I KNOW are there. A male honey bee would have no chance at watching a dance and finding a flower based off where the sun is compared to the hive. Although maybe if my wife would tell me things through interpretive dance I would remember better.
30. Honey is the only food that contains a brain-improving antioxidant called pinocembrin.
31. One pound of bees wax is produced for every 60 pounds of honey.
32. Honey is pretty healthy stuff. Admittedly, not a real analytical fact.
33. The honey bee is the only insect that produces food we eat. I guess we could stand to broaden our palette a little bit. You would have thought at least one other insect would get with the program.
34. Honey is an antiseptic, so if you want to skip out on the emergency room visit just rub honey all over the wound. That’s what we used to do back in the good ol’ days.
35. There are over 20,000 species of bees in the world. This number is probably the same no matter how far out you put your parameters. We chose to limit it to ‘the world.’ While not a strictly ‘honey bee fact,’ I doubt anyone is holding us to that at this point.
36. The largest known bee is the Megachile Pluto. It measures up to 4cm. Once again, not a honey bee fact. But, come on! That IS a fun fact. Here’s a picture of it that doesn’t show scale.

    

37. We’ll end with a corny joke amongst beekeepers, “Drones fly on United Airlines.” That’s it, that’s the joke. I guess because of the way queens and drones mate. The queen puts a scent out into the air and drones from miles around chase her. Yeah, I don’t get it either. So, I guess the fact here is ‘Beekeepers are not great joke tellers.’

If I’m being honest, there were probably only twenty-five or -six fun facts. Some of the facts were depressing, and some may have seemed like me just rambling. I already made the cover photo though, so we’ll stick with 37 fun facts.

I hesitated to put ’37’ in the title because I didn’t want to be accused of writing clickbait articles. But, I mean, you DID click on it. If I saw an article title that said “37 facts about…” anything, I probably wouldn’t read it. That’s too many facts. Still, I didn’t want you to not know what you were getting yourself into.

Here’s what the sign looks like now.

See? Not so depressing anymore. 🙂

Thanks for reading. Don’t worry, most of my articles aren’t this informative. Here’s a few more you can check out if you don’t believe me.

Mr. Burrito Bowl Goes to Jury Duty

Why Small Talk is The Worst

Things We Should Stop Doing

If you enjoyed this article please share it with anyone you know who has ever seen a honey bee.

Sources: matteroftrust.org, Nat Geo Kids, American Beekeeping Federation, howtogettingridofbees.com, 

Author: MrBurritoBowl

Mr. Burrito Bowl is a 34-year-old man from Whitefish, Montana who likes to draw stick figures and say things that sometimes relate to finances, but not always. View all posts by MrBurritoBowl