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Explore 10 captivating honey bees facts
Find out all about our brilliant honey bees!
To celebrate the launch of our new Honey Bees collection the team at The Gifts&Flowers Company wanted to share some of our interesting discoveries packed with fun-filled information on native bees. Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables – helping plants to grow. Honey bees do this by transferring pollen between the male and female parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit.
Our honey bees are just incredible…however their number is in real decline, due to several factors including disease, habitat loss and impacts of pesticide use – so the more we know and understand about these amazing honey bees, the more we can champion and help protect them.
Feeling the Buzz yet?
1. Honey bees – fun facts
- All worker bees are female.
- A honey bee produces a teaspoon of honey (about 5 grams) in her lifetime.
- To produce a kilogram of honey, bees fly the equivalent of three times around the world in air miles.
- The type of flower the bees take their nectar from determines the honey’s flavour.
2. Honeybees will visit as many as 100 flowers on each trip out of the hive, to gather pollen and nectar. Pollen is an important source of protein for bees, while nectar provides both water and glucose for energy.
3. Within the very core of the honey bees hive, the honey bees cluster around eggs and the larvae of the baby bees to keep the core temperature a constant 35 degrees Celsius – an optimum temperature no matter the outside temperature.
4. Like the bumblebee, honey bees are important pollinators – responsible for pollinating one-third of the crops we eat, a key to the human food chain.
5. Within a honey bees life, each honey bee will fly up to five miles to find food in the form of pollen. In most cases, bee farmers will often densely plant native pollinating flowers close by to reduce the stress of the colony.
6. Like all living things, water – a natural source helps to keep us alive. Honeybees are no different, these small flying insects travel far and wide to collect water to bring back to the colony.
7. The native honey bee here in Britain is much darker than the bees most of us would recognise; often referred to as the dark European honey bee as it’s originally native to most of the north of Europe and doesn’t feature the yellow bands of other honey bees. A largely forgotten subspecies of the honey bee, it’s now quite rare, but perfectly adapted to our climate.
8. Inside a beehive, there is 1 queen and her sole job is to ensure the survival of the colony by laying sufficient eggs for the continual reproduction of the colony. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behaviour of the other bees and in the height of summer, she can lay as many as 2,500 eggs in a single day.
9. If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva (the newly hatched baby insects) and feeding it a special food called “royal jelly“. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.
10. Honey is an entirely natural product and its taste is a signature of the landscape from which the bees foraged. The result is honey that tastes different from wherever you buy it. Some of the honeybees’ favourite plants include borage, crocus, salix, marjoram, helenium and phacelia to name just a few.
If you love bees as much as we do then why not buzz over to our bee..autiful bees collection and take a browse? We’ve got lots to choose from with our bee design which features on kitchen linens, table linens, bags and accessories.