The honeybee may be small, but it sure is mighty! But what’s all the “buzz” about? Why are these little bees so important? It is because the honeybee is responsible for pollinating over $15 billion worth of crops in the U.S. each year, including more than 130 types of fruits and vegetables. Honeybees pollinate about one third of the world’s food supply, which is “un-bee-lievable!” And of course, we cannot forget about the honeybee’s sweet, delicious honey we all love and enjoy!
Everyone knows there is only one queen bee, but it takes a whole hive to get the job done. Honeybee colonies are incredibly large; an average colony can contain up to 50,000 bees! But honeybees are not born knowing how to make honey. Instead, they learn from the older bees in the hive. They first forage for nectar from flowers, visiting up to 100 flowers in a single trip, then return to the hive with the nectar stored in the bee’s stomach. The stomach enzymes break down the nectar into simple sugars, which is stored safely inside honeycomb and later harvested by beekeepers. To make just one pound of honey, worker bees fly roughly 55,000 miles and visit 2 million flowers! Now that’s a lot of SkyMiles!
Honeybees have many “buzz-worthy” features that makes them fascinating insects! For example, honeybees:
- have a special way to communicate with each other—they perform a dance (“waggle dance”) that indicates the location, size, and distance to a food source.
- can fly up to 15 miles per hour!
- only sting if they feel threatened. Honeybees have a barbed stinger, which will become stuck in the victim’s skin and detached from the bee’s body after stinging, leading to the bee’s death. The barbed stinger is a feature specific to the honeybee, which no other species of bee has. And only female bees can sting because only female bees have stingers.
- have five eyes (two large compound eyes and three smaller, simple eyes), which allows them to see in multiple different directions at the same time. Honeybees have even been found to positively recognize human faces in experimental studies!
- can see ultraviolet light, which allows them to easily find nectar. And they have the ability to see color at a rapid speed. Their color vision is the fastest in the animal kingdom—5 times faster than humans!
- create hexagonal honeycomb cells, where they store their honey. Honeybees would get an A+ in Geometry class because they have a fantastic sense of symmetry.
However, despite all the amazing benefits provided to us by the honeybee, the honeybee population has sadly been declining, largely due to industrialized agriculture and the use of pesticides. Global warming has also played a contributing role in the endangerment of the honeybee population with increased flooding, droughts, and changes in the blooming seasons of flowering plants affecting the bees’ ecosystems. But there are many ways we can help the honeybees! We can plant flowers and plants that attract the bees so they can pollinate, we can buy local honey to support honey producers, and most importantly we can refrain from killing bee hives and instead contact a local beekeeper to safely relocate the bees to a new home.
So the next time you see a buzzing bee in your yard remember to save the bees, protect our planet, and always “BEE Happy!”