Bee facts

The more I read about bees the more amazing I find them. I used to eat honey like it was going out of style... well I still do, but now I appreciate it a lot more. Here are a few things to think about when thinking of bees and honey.

Honey is bee food. It is not made as a bi-product that humans can eat. So when you eat honey, you are eating the food that the bees made in order to live and to maintain the lives of the bees in the hive. When you take honey, you must understand that you are taking food from your hive and thus are risking their health.

Honey is also bee medicine. As honey is anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and a whole lot more they eat it as food, but they also use it to maintain the health of the colony.... so think about this when you take honey. Especially when you expect to have a hard winter.

Additional bee facts:

*Bees from the same hive visit about 225,000 flowers per day. One single bee usually visits between 50-1000 flowers a day, but can visit up to several thousand.

*Queens will lay almost 2000 eggs a day at a rate of 5 or 6 a minute. Between 175,000-200,000 eggs are laid per year.

*The average hive temperature is 93.5 degrees.

*Beeswax production in most hives is about 1 1/2% to 2% of the total honey yield.

*About 8 pounds of honey is eaten by bees to produce 1 pound of beeswax.

*Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for humans.

*Just a single hive contains approximately 40-45,000 bees!

*During honey production periods, a bee's life span is about 6 weeks.

*Honeybees visit about 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey.

*A bee travels an average of 1600 round trips in order to produce one ounce of honey; up to 6 miles per trip. To produce 2 pounds of honey, bees travel a distance equal to 4 times around the earth.

*Bees fly an average of 13-15 mph.

I took these facts from : http://www.indianchild.com/bees.htm. They can actually be found in pretty much any beekeeping book or book with bee information.

So just remember when you have beeswax candles that all the wax that goes into them took a long time for the bees to create.