Welcome to Our Official Site!
Honeybee Facts for Kids
- A honey bee is a flying insect that is a member of the genus Apis.
- There are seven living species of bees that are considered honey bees.
- The seven living species of honey bees are the black dwarf honey bee (Apis andreniformis), red dwarf honey bee (Apis florea), giant honey bee (Apis dorsata), eastern honey bee (Apis cerana), western honey bee (Apis mellifera), Koschevnikov's honey bee (Apis koschevnikovi) and Philippine honey bee (Apis nigrocincta).
- Honey bees are social insects that live in colonies.
- Honey bees communicate with each other using odors, chemicals and dancing.
- A honey bee colony can have tens of thousands of bees.
- There are three types of honey bees in a colony, and they are the queen, workers and drones.
- There are four stages of a honey bees’ life, and they are egg, larva, pupa and adult.
- A queen honey bee’s lifespan is about five years and they can lay on average 2,500 eggs a day during the summer months.
- Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is an event when most of the worker bees in a colony abandon their nest.
- A honey bee can fly up to 15 miles per hour.
- The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) plays a major role in the human food chain. They are used extensively to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. Their pollination efforts are measured in billions of dollars.
- The Africanized bee honey, popularly called the killer bee, is a hybrid of the western honey bee. They are extremely aggressive and over 1,000 people have lost their loves to a killer bee attack.
- Beekeeping (apiculture) is a hobby and/or commercial business where honey bee colonies are maintained in made-made hives and bee products are harvested.
- A bee yard, also known as an apiary, is where a beekeeper keeps his honey bee beehives.
- All types of bees really do have five eyes. The two big eyes on a bee are called compound eyes because they are made up of thousands of tiny lenses. Each lens (called a facet) sees a small part of a scene and, all together, the lenses form an entire picture.
- These detect light (but not shapes), meaning that a bee can sense if it is being approached from above by a predator. The two large eyes either side of its head are made up of lots tiny lenses that each piece together a wider image of what the bee can see - this is known as a compound eye
- Bees have two stomachs - one stomach for eating and the other is for storing nectar collected from flowers or water so that they can carry it back to their hive.
- Bees use the position of the sun to navigate and there is evidence of their sensitivity to the earth's magnetic field. Also bees' eyes are sensitive to polarized light, which penetrates through even thick cloud, so bees are able to 'see' the sun in poor weather
- Bees and many other animals use what is known as optical flow to determine how fast they are going and how far they have moved through their environment. ... It also identifies the neurons that use polarised light to determine the bee's compass direction
