August 15 is World Honey Bee Day. Bees are interesting creatures, so today’s post includes some fascinating facts about honeybees. I’ve also got six ways you can celebrate bees by enjoying some honey today.

This post was originally published in August 2020 and updated in June 2023.

I have always been a little afraid of bees, mainly out of fear of being stung. Honestly, I never really paid much attention to them until a couple of years ago when I learned that our neighbour John is a beekeeper. He’s an interesting guy and he loves to talk about his bees. He’s always willing to answer our questions and we’ve learned a lot from talking to him.

If you’re interested in learning more about bees, beekeeping, and how honey is made, check out the Ontario Beekeepers Association’s All About Honey website. It’s a great source of information where I found many of the facts in this post.

Fascinating facts about honeybees

Honeybees are amazing creatures. Here are some cool facts about honeybees that you might not know.

They are important to our food supply

• One-third of the human diet is derived either directly or directly from insect-pollinated plants. Bees are critical to our food supply—responsible for 80% of crop pollination.
• Bees are the only insects that make food humans can eat.

Bees are part of a community

• Honeybees are social creatures because they live and work together in a community, called a colony. They cannot survive on their own outside the colony.
• There are three kinds of bees in the colony: the queen, the worker bees and the drones. Let’s take a closer look at the role each of them plays.

The queen

Beyonce might like to call herself Queen Bee but she has very little in common with these queens.

• There is usually only one queen bee per colony.
• The queen only leaves the hive once in her lifetime for her mating flight. She stores enough sperm from her mating flight to lay between 1,000 and 1,500 eggs a day during her lifetime.
• Queens live, on average, for 2-3 years.

Drones

The role of the male drones in the colony is interesting. They don’t actually do any work. That’s left to the female worker bees.

• Drones are the male bees. There may be hundreds or thousands of drones in a hive.
• The drones’ only job is to find a queen to mate with. If they are successful, they will die soon after mating. If they don’t succeed, they are evicted from the hive at the end of the summer. Because they can’t survive outside the colony, they will die of exposure.
• Drones don’t have a stinger.

Workers

The rest of the bees in the hive are the workers. You’ve probably heard the expression “busy as a bee”. The more you learn about worker bees, the more this makes sense.

• A colony may have up to 80,000 workers.
• Worker bees are all female. Their job is to look after the babies and the hive.
• Inside the hive, they pack pollen and nectar into cells and fan the hive with their wings to cool. They also guard the hive.
• Outside the hive, their job is to find pollen.
• The job of a worker bee at any point in time depends on her age. Younger workers look after cleaning the hive. Collecting pollen falls to the older bees. Check out Perfect Bee for more information on the jobs.
• Worker bees will only sting if they feel threatened. Once she uses her stinger, a worker bee will die.
• Honeycomb inside the hive is built entirely out of beeswax secreted from four sets of glands in the worker bee’s abdomen.
• They have two stomachs. One for eating and another to store nectar to carry back to the hive.
• The lifespan of a worker bee in summer is usually five to six weeks. They literally work themselves to death.

They cover a lot of distance

• A bee can fly 24 kilometres in an hour.
• It takes 556 worker bees to make one pound of honey. Bees fly the equivalent of a trip around the world to make one pound of honey. Considering their short lifespan, that’s a lot of flying!

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So, instead of being afraid of honeybees, we really should be fascinated by them. They do a lot for us. Now, let’s talk about the honey they produce!

Why honey is good for you

We know it’s delicious, but did you know honey is also good for you?

Flavonoids and phenols in honey create antioxidant and anti-inflammatory health benefits. These benefits can prevent chronic diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease and arthritis.

Although it is high in calories, the health benefits make it a better alternative than refined sugar.

The one caution about honey is that you shouldn’t feed it to babies under one year of age. It could cause infant botulism from the spores in honey because their immature digestive systems don’t contain the healthy bacteria needed to protect them.

Ways to enjoy honey

Here are six ways you can celebrate honeybees and enjoy some delicious and healthy honey today.

• Add a little to your breakfast smoothie.
• Use it instead of sugar to sweeten your tea.
• Spread it on some whole grain toast.
• Put it on your morning cereal instead of sugar.
• Create a relaxing honey face mask by mixing liquid honey with olive, grapeseed or almond oil.
• Pamper yourself with my easy honey-lemon foot scrub.

Finally, you can celebrate World Honey Bee Day, and do your part to support the important work of bees, by planting some flowers in your garden.

Do you enjoy honey? What’s your favourite thing to make with it? Tell us below.