Honeybees have created a very intricate language to communicate the location of the best nectar, with reference from the sun. Astonishingly enough, they can do this on overcast days as well as at night; this done by calculating the position of the sun on the other side of the world. This indicates that honey bees can actually learn and store information regardless of having a brain 1.5 million times smaller than ours.
There are about 950,000 neurones in a bee's brain as opposed o the nearly 200billion neurones found in the human brain.
Honeybees have a congenital 'map' of the sun's movement across the sky over 24 hours and can modify it to fit their geographical conditions very quickly; within 5 seconds they know where they're headed.The honeybee is also the most sensitive creature there is to the Earth's magnetic field. They use this sense to maneuver about and also to make the honeycomb panels of their hives. If a strong magnet is placed next to a hive under construction, the result is a strange cylindrical comb, unlike anything found in nature. The hive's temperature is exactly the same as that of the human body (37°C).
Bees have evolved over 150 million years ago around the same time as the Cretaceous Period when flowering plants had formed. The Apis genus (honeybees) didn't exist until around 25 million years ago and are really a form of vegetarian wasp.
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| queen bee |
Queen honeybees give off a chemical called 'queen substance'. The substance is smelled by worker bees through their antennae and prevents them from developing ovaries.
It takes the full lifetime (about a month) of twelve worker bees to make enough honey to fill a teaspoon. a single bee would have to travel about 46,600 miles (almost twice around the world) to produce one pound of honey.
Bees will travel as much as seven and a half miles per trip, many times each day to retrieve nectar for the colony. Hence the alliteration, 'as busy as a bee'.
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