- The gorgeous Jacaranda tree in all its beautiful glory blankets the ground with its fallen flowers. These trees provide so much more food for the pollen harvesting bees. Always wear shoes under these alluring purple trees as you could stand on a bee and get a nasty sting.
- Each bee has 170 odorant receptors, a serious sense of smell. They use this to communicate within the hive and to recognize different types of flowers when looking for food.
- The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.
- The queen can live up to five years. She is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!
- 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.
- Honey bees are brilliant flyers. They fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second!
- Honey bees are also brilliant dancers! To share information about the best food sources, they perform their ‘waggle dance’. When the worker returns to the hive, it moves in a figure-of-eight and waggles its body to indicate the direction of the food source.
- Sadly, over the past 15 years, colonies of bees have been disappearing, and the reason remains unknown. Referred to as ‘colony collapse disorder’, billions of Honey bees across the world are leaving their hives, never to return. In some regions, up to 90% of bees have disappeared!
Do your bit to support these brilliant bugs and plant flowers rich in nectar, such as lavender and bluebells, which will help bees find the food they need.
