I keep on reading random bee facts from several sources so I felt that I should join in the fun….there are really some
amazing facts out there about our friends the bees. These are some of the reasons why I also wanted to get involved!
I think I will start off with probably the most frightening one:
“If the bee dissapeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left” Albert Einstein
- Though the Latin name for the Honey Bee is “Apis mellifera“, it should actually be called “Apis mellifica” which literal translation is honey maker. The formers translation is honey carrying bee which technically is wrong…..
- A Honey Bee will visit 1,500 flowers to collect just one load of pollen which will weigh only 15mg
- It takes 2 million trips by a colony to collect the 30kg of nectar needed to turn into honey to feed their young and this is then doubled to 4 million trips if they want enough honey to see them through the winter!!
- Breaking that last fact down this means that the average colony would need to make 45,000 trips every day per colony and considering each bee could fly 6miles in a round trip that means that one single colony could travel as much as 450,000km in one day!
- Each bee will fly around 500 miles in their lifetime which, after all that, makes approximately half a teaspoon of honey!
These are some of the amazing facts I have taken from my current reading book “A world without bees” by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum. I will do a full review shortly.
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February 17, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Marcia
These little creatures are amazing – I am what my kids called `obsessed` with beez – I have a large and growing library, some old stuff which is fun to read and a number of books I have sent oversea for, the latest being `The Beekeepers Pupil` by Sara George, a historical fiction based on the true story of Francois Huber a blind naturalist who with the help and `eyes` of his manservant, discovered many facts about bees that we now take for granted, ie how the queen mates who with and where !
February 18, 2010 at 12:02 pm
jamesdearsley
Hey Marcia, they are amazing aren’t they! Hope all is well with you. Thanks for commenting by the way.
James
February 23, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Book Review “A World Without Bees” « The musings of a surreybeekeeper
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March 24, 2010 at 5:04 pm
A SurreyBeeKeeper » Blog Archive » Book Review "A World Without Bees"
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