Here are just some of the amazing things you can learn about honey bees:

• Nearly all the bees in a colony are female
• The colony’s queen is the mother of all the bees
• A queen bee mates with more than 30 different males (drones), but just once
• As she lays, a queen can choose the sex of the egg, depending on the needs of the colony
• The queen never leaves the hive after her mating flight and just lays eggs all day
• A female larva normally grows into a sterile worker bee, but will grow into a queen if constantly fed royal jelly
• A normal-sized colony may have 30 to 60 thousand bees in it
• Honey bees can fly up to 5 miles to collect resources the colony needs: nectar, pollen, water, and sap or pitch from trees
• Worker bees die after stinging a mammal
• A queen honey bee can sting a mammal and survive, but queens rarely sting.
• Male bees (called drones) don't have stingers.
• When a foraging bee finds a great source of food or other resources, she returns to the colony and does a “waggle dance” from which other bees can tell where to fly to find that resource
• Swarming—in which half or more of a colony’s bees, plus the queen, fly off to find and occupy another nesting place—is the natural reproductive act of a bee colony (See Swarms [Link])
• In her entire lifetime, a worker honey bee produces only 1/12^th of a teaspoon of honey
• Honey bees maintain a warm temperature inside their colony, year-round. If there is brood present (developing egg and larvae), they keep that brood at about 94 degrees, even if the temperatures outside are below freezing
• Drones (male honey bees) have no fathers, but they all have grandfathers. They develop from unfertilized eggs
• The population of a colony may detect that a batch of drones has unfavorable/inferior traits. They will evict those drones immediately to avoid passing on the bad traits
• Honey bees can walk with 6 legs. Get together with 2 friends and try it
• A honey bee’s mouth opens sideways. Their tongues fold up under their chins
• The power output of a bee in flight is about 40 times that of a human doing intense activity (per unit of muscle mass)
• Bees don’t have ears, and they don’t hear. They do sense vibration, so they may react to sound that way
• They don’t have a nose. They smell through their antenna
• Bees have 5 eyes and don’t see the same colors that we do. While human color vision is based on the colors red, blue, and green—the vision of a honey bee is based on blue, green, and ultraviolet light
• Bees choose where to move when they swarm in a process that involves scout bees competitively signaling to the colony about new home locations. The most enthusiasm generated decides the new location