Honey Bee Facts

Did You Know?

Honey bees evolved about 60 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.
There are no indigenous honey bees in the United States, European honey bees (German Black Bees) were first introduced into this country (Virginia) about 1621-22.
30% of our agrarian and up to 70% of our feral honey bee colonies have disappeared or died.
Honey bees pollinate 30% of all the food that Americans consume and:
- Pollinate 85% of all flowering plants
- Perform 90% of all pollen transfers on our orchard crops
One honey bee visits 50-100 flowers during each collection trip and can harvest several thousand flowers in a day, making 12 or more trips, gathering pollen or nectar from a single floral species each.
Nectar collected from flowers is swallowed and in the honey stomach enzymes (invertase) are induced which convert the sugars (sucrose) into levulose and dextrose sugars.
It takes about 556 worker bees to gather 1 pound of honey from about 2 million flowers.
It takes about 55,000 flight miles per gallon (12#) of honey.
The average honey bee will make only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime (6 weeks). These foragers are the oldest bees in the hive and it is during the last two weeks of their lives that they gather nectar, pollen, water, and propolis.
A hive can gather pollen and nectar from up to 500 million flowers in a year.
9 pounds of honey is synthesized to make 1 pound of beeswax.
The bees use about 8 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of honey.
During peak nectar flows, a healthy hive can produce 2 to 5 pounds of honey per day. A scaled colony in Maryland was reported to gain 25 pounds of brood, honeycomb and honey in one day.
Honey bees can fly up to 6 miles from the hive at 15 mph with their wings beating 11,400 times per minute.
Honey bees use the sun as a directional marker when leaving and returning to the hive. The returning foragers do a waggle dance on the vertical comb surfaces in a circle or figure eight pattern which shows the other bees in which direction, and how far to fly.
Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his work on Honey Bee Communications.
Roughly fifty thousand worker bees live in a colony along with one queen and several hundred drones.
- During the warmer months the worker bees live about six weeks, the queen can live up to three years.
- Worker bees born in the fall will live throughout the winter with the hive population being about half of what it is in the summer.
Average interior temperature of the hive's brood area is 93-95 degrees (F) regardless of the outside temperature. In colder weather they do not hibernate, but cluster generating heat much like musk-ox and penguins.
There are approximately 2.7 million managed Honey Bee Hives in the USA.
- Roughly between 1.8 and 2 million of those hives are moved into the Central Valley of California each February to pollinate almonds.
- 85% of the world’s almonds are grown in California. Almonds can not be grown commercially without honey bees to pollinate them.
- The honey bee related pollination market is roughly a 15 billion dollar industry.