From Waggle Dance to Mating: Unique & Weird Facts About Honeybees

Honey bees are fab flyers. They fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second!

During the mating period, as many as 25,000 drones, from dozens of different hives, will meet in a drone congregation area, to mate with queens from surrounding hives.

Honey bees are so obsessed with cleanliness that most will leave the hive when they know it’s time to die, to avoid contaminating brood and food stocks.

When a bee finds a promising food source, it passes on that information to the others when it returns to the hive through what is called the “waggle dance.”

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! In their prime, queens lay an egg every 43 seconds.

When a new queen bee emerges from her cell, she must defeat her sister queens before she can assume the throne.

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.