Flash
20/5/24
World Bee Day
On the 20th May every year it is World Bee Day. Bees are incredibly important to our world, as they play a very big role in pollenating plants and crops. Without them the food we produce from growing plants wouldn’t grow! When bees fly to flowers to collect food, they collect pollen on their bodies. They then fly from one flower to another and this pollen is transferred to the different flowers and this fertilises them. This is how we get all our fruits and vegetables to grow, as well as things such as cotton, coffee and chocolate! 75% of all crops in the world rely on bees and other similar creatures, without them they wouldn’t grow.
Unbelievably many species of bee are actually endangered. The numbers of some species are getting too small, and some are already extinct. This has been caused by chemicals used in farming and gardening, habitat loss and diseases that have spread. There are lots of small things we can do to help, the main one being making sure we have bee friendly flowers growing in our gardens if we can, without these flowers bees cannot get enough food.
Top 10 Bee Facts
1. Bees are insects. They have 3 parts to their bodies, a head, thorax and abdomen, 6 legs, 5 eyes, 4 wings and 2 antennae. Bees are covered in tiny hairs. Pollen sticks to these hairs are help the bees transfer the pollen from flower to flower.
2. There are thought to be around 20 000 different species of bee! Most of these bees are solitary bees, which means they like to live alone. Bumblebees and honey bees make up a much smaller number of the species, with there thought to be less than 10 species of honey bee. These bees live in colonies together in a hive or nest.
3. Bumblebees and honey bees have a queen bee in charge of the colony. Then there are worker bees who are female and do all the work, including going out to gather nectar and pollen. And finally there are male drone bees. The worker bees outnumber the drone bees, with there being about 100 female bees to 1 male bee.
4. Queen bees are very important to a colony. They are much bigger than the other bees so are quite easy to spot. Their job is to lay eggs and they can incredibly lay between 1000 and 2000 eggs every day when it is time. Most bees live for quite a short time, but queen bees can live for 3 to 5 years.
5. Bees live off nectar, which is a sweet fluid produced by flowers and pollen. Honey bees will also eat the honey they produce when there is not enough flowers for them to feed off or during cold or bad weather.
6. Bees can fly really far to find food, sometimes even as far as 3 to 5 miles, but will usually stay around 1 mile away from their home. They can visit between 50 to 100 flowers in one trip. When they fly they make a buzzing sound, which is caused by them flapping their wings together really fast, around 230 times a second!
7. Honey Bees are known to do a waggle dance, which is their way of communicating with the other bees and telling them where to go to find food.
8. Bees have a super sense of smell, which is 100 times better than a humans and a super strength too, being able to carry 80% of their body weight in pollen from flower to flower.
9. Only female bees can sting, and they only do this if they are frightened. Honey bees can only sting once, but other species of bee, such as bumblebees can sting more than once.
10. If you find a bee struggling to fly and looking really tired you can give it a mix of sugar water (50% white sugar, 50% water) to help it have the energy to fly off again.
All photos and illustrations in this blog post are Whizzbots and Public Domain images.