Interesting Facts About Bees

Bees are really cool!  Here are some reasons why:

• In a single collecting trip, a worker will visit between 50 and 100 flowers. She will return to the hive carrying over half her weight in pollen and nectar.  Sometimes when I watch the front of my hive the bees will be visibly weighed down from all of the pollen.  Here is a photo (that I did not take) of a bee with a lot of pollen on her legs in what is called her "pollen basket"

• A strong hive will have up to 100,000 bees in the summer.  An average hive has more like 40,000-60,000 depending on the season, where 30,000 of those are working on tasks inside the hive and the other 30,000 are working outside the hive.  I suspect my hive currently has about 20,000 bees but who's counting!?
• Bees travel up to 5 miles to gather pollen and nectar and can fly up to 15 miles per hour!  We charted out the possible foraging radius (hivetracks.com) and saw that our bees could really be all over downtown Raleigh including all the way to the NC State Rose Garden.

• Foraging bees teach other foragers where to find honey by using the waggle dance:

• Honey bees work around the clock.  They do take naps or sleep for a few hours at a time but even at night they can be found working building or repairing combs.
• The queen lays about 1,000 eggs a day but can lay up to 2,000 in the spring and summer when an increased population is demanded.
• Bees are not born into an assigned task for life, rather they progress through different jobs as they age.  The roles are as follows:

•  The honey bee only dies when she stings an enemy with soft skin, such as a human, but they do not die when the sting other predators like insects. 
• When bees buzz they produce a negative charge.  Supposedly pollen has a positive charge and therefore the pollen clings to the bee through an electromagnetism.
• Theoretically, when bees smell smoke they fill up on their honey stores.  This expands their abdomen which makes it more difficult for them to bend, and thus it should make their stings less deep and severe. 
• Bees are able to solve the traveling salesman problem by determining the fastest and most efficient route to multiple destinations and they're able to solve the problem faster than a supercomputer.  They are also able to count to 4, but only 4.  This is based on a study where pollen was placed in the fourth tube and the bees were able to repeatedly select the fourth out of a series of tubes.
• The queen does not necessarily mate with a drone from her own hive.  She mates with about 20 drones that happen to be around when she does her mating flight.  This means that the hive is not all inbred but is a mix of at least half different genes.  During that mating flight the drones will deposit upwards of 90 million sperm in the queen's oviducts. The queen, however, will not use all the sperm. She stores about seven million sperm to use throughout her life.
• And finally, my favorite fact yet: The drone dies in the mating process: the wind pressure developed during his attempt to catch and mount the queen actually causes him to explode with an audible pop as he ejaculates inside of her. He then falls off the queen, usually leaving a portion of his phallus inside her.

For more amazing information I encourage you to watch this documentary from PBS NOVA called Tales from the Hive.  It is really fascinating and the footage will have you awed.  There's a corresponding article about how NOVA was able to capture the footage which is pretty incredible.