10 Surprising Statistics About Honeybees
Find out the buzz on one of the hardest working insects on the planet!
- Honeybees can fly up to 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) from their nest in search of food.
- Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water.
- Honeybees, from a typical hive, visit approximately 225,000 flowers per day.
- In her lifetime, a honeybee worker will travel about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles)!
- In her six-week life span, one worker bee will only make 1/10th of a teaspoon of honey.
- Honeybees must consume about 17-20 pounds of honey to make one pound of beeswax.
- A typical foraging honeybee will work herself to death in about three weeks.
- Queen bees will lay as many as 2,000 eggs on a good day or an average of one every 45 seconds.
- Honeybees have five eyes but see very few colors; they cannot see red.
- A honeybee produces beeswax from eight paired glands on the underside of her abdomen.
Want To Find Out More About The Disappearance Of Our Honeybees?
Honeybees are dying off at an incredibly disturbing rate. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), a condition where bees stray from the hive and never find their way back, is nixing millions of nature's pollinators every year. Not only do the bees abandon their hive, but the queen and the brood as well. Unnatural? Unheard of? Even the predators that usually raid the hive for honey stay far away. At first, this occurrence sounds like an urban legend or an exaggerated tale. Except it’s not. The situation is both dire and all too real.
Vanishing of the Bees follows commercial beekeepers David Hackenberg and Dave Mendes as they strive to keep their bees healthy and fulfill pollination contracts across the U.S. The film explores the struggles they face as the two friends plead their case on Capital Hill and travel across the Pacific Ocean in the quest to protect their honeybees.
Since this nearly year-long investigation first began, thousands of beekeepers around the globe have come out of the bee yard and admitted to the same problem, with some reporting losses of more than 90 percent of their colonies. And there are no dead bees to be found. It is estimated that CCD has resulted in the death of more than one quarter of the 2.4 million bee colonies in at least 35 states across America.
Filmed across the US, Europe, Australia and Asia, this documentary examines the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the greater meaning it holds about the relationship between mankind and mother earth. As scientists puzzle over the cause, organic beekeepers indicate alternative reasons for this tragic loss.