Continuing our Fun Facts About Bees theme for this week, here are another 25 fun facts to add to the list... did you know:

Female worker honeybees can only sting once due to barbed stingers that tear away from their abdomens after they sting, but other species have barbless stingers and can sting repeatedly.

When bees do the ‘waggle dance,’ a long slow dance means that food is far away or not a great quality, but a short fast dance means great food is nearby.

Bees can carry up to 122 times their body weight in pollen and nectar.

Honey bee queens lay between 1,200 to 3,000 eggs every single day.

The honeybee queen can live anywhere from 2 years to 3 or 4 years.

Male honeybees are called drones and they are from unfertilized eggs, so they have no daddy.

Drones live to die! Their only real job in life is to mate with a virgin queen, and once they do, they die.

The drone’s natural life cycle, if not cut short due to a successful mating trip, is an average of 55 days.

Bees do not defy the laws of aero dynamics. Their wings generate tiny cyclones that lift them up.

Bees flap their wings 190-200 times per second, for a total of 12,000 beats per minute!

 

In this 5:11-minute video by WatchMojo.com you'll find out another Top 5 Facts About Bees:

 

 

Napoleon Bonaparte chose the bee as a symbol of immortality even though a worker bee’s lifespan is short.

Worker bees live around 6 to 7 weeks if raised in the spring and 4 to 6 months if raised in autumn.

Honeybees do sleep but they don’t have circadian rhythms like humans do, so they don’t look like they are asleep. When bees snooze, their antennae and bellies droop.

Honeybees can be trained to detect illness in humans.

It is hypothesized that honeybees may dream but that hasn't been confirmed yet, although it is said they consolidate memories during sleep, just like humans.

Yes, honeybees do poop.

Honeybees stick poop pellets to the outside of their hives to deter giant Asian hornets.

Japanese honeybees have developed what is called the hot ball defense. If the hive is invaded, up to 500 bees ambush the intruder and hiss, sting, and beat their wings fast to kill them with heat by roasting them alive.

Trophallaxis is the term for how honeybees communicate through pheromones, which are passed on through feeding.

A honey bee flies at a speed of up to 15 miles per hour.

Honeybees make honeycomb hexagonal because it is a highly efficient use of beeswax and minimizes waste.

Worker honeybees make 10 million foraging trips to produce 1 single jar of honey.

Some plants drug their nectar with caffeine and nicotine so bees will continue to visit them.

A small positive charge builds up when bees fly, and plants have a small negative charge, so when a bee lands on a petal or leaf, plant pollen literally jumps onto the bee.

Take it from the bees, you don’t have to be big to BEE mighty!

If you missed yesterday's blog post, 22 Amazing Facts About Bees, you can find them here.

Come back tomorrow for more amazing facts about bees.

 

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