10 Amazing Facts About Honey Bees You Never Knew

Honey bees are some of the most fascinating creatures on Earth. Beyond their essential role as pollinators, they possess unique behaviors, complex social structures, and impressive biological traits. Here are twelve of the most interesting facts about honey bees I have learned after working with them for the last 14 years:

1. They Have an Extraordinary Sense of Smell
   Honey bees have a highly developed sense of smell, which helps them locate flowers and communicate with each other. They can detect and distinguish thousands of different floral scents and pheromones, enabling them to navigate their environment with precision. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) have 170 odorant receptors, compared with 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. It is about 50 times greater than a dog’s sense of smell. Because of this, bees have been used by the military to detect land mines and explosives. In contrast, they have only 10 gustatory receptors, making their sense of taste not so strong.

2. Honey Bees Can Recognize Human Faces
   Studies have shown that honey bees can recognize and remember human faces using their advanced pattern recognition skills. A study was conducted where a person visited a hive day after day and gave them a reward. Then, two people visited the hive and the bees went over to the person who had been giving them the reward with their proboscis's sticking out, ready for their treat!

3. Bees Prefer Nectar with Caffeine. Some nectar has caffeine in it including the flowers on coffee and citrus trees. Researchers have show that honey bees feeding on a sugar solution containing caffeine,  were three times more likely to remember a flower’s scent than those feeding on just sugar. "The effect of caffeine on the bees’ long-term memory was profound, with three times as many bees remembering the floral scent 24 hours later and twice as many bees remembering the scent after three days."

4. Bees Can Get Drunk: Bees can be exposed to alcohol in nature through alcoholic tree sap and fermented nectar. In one study, scientists fed ethanol to honey bees in different amounts. Within 10 minutes, they were showing signs of inebriation. Some spent more time walking around inside the hive, some couldn’t stand up right or fly and the ones fed the most ethanol couldn’t get up off their backs.

5. Parts of a Bee: Honey bees have 1 brain roughly the size of a sesame seed, 2 stomachs (one for eating and a honey crop for storing nectar), 4 wings (the worker bees’ are the shortest and the drones’ are the largest), 5 eyes (not really eyes but we’ll talk about that later), 6 legs and 170 odorant receptors.
6. Bees See Motion Faster: Bees don’t have eyeballs, they have two large compound eyes on the sides of their heads and three smaller simple eyes on top to detect light and movement. They see the world five times faster than humans. They detect movements using the 4,000 to 7,000 facets located in their compound eyes. As a result, they can see movements that happen at 1/300th of a second. Humans see at 1/50th of a second.

7. Bees Do Sleep. The younger, house bees can be found sleeping on the comb as well as inside the cells during the day and night. Foragers sleep on the cells and mostly in the evenings.

8. The Venom of a Bee Is as Toxic as the Venom of a Cobra.

9. Elephants are terrified of bees! Despite their thick skin, they have sensitive areas around their mouth, eyes and behind their ears and inside their trunk. Young calves have thinner skin so swarms can do real damage.

   In Africa, an organization is using beehive fences (hives along the perimeter of a farm with rope or wires connecting them). When the fence is disturbed, the hives sway which aggravates the bees. This not only protects the farm, but the elephants from being killed by farmers protecting their crops and home. However, this is not apis mellifera being used in this project. Of the 17 elephant families tested, 16 fled within 80 seconds and half fled within 10 seconds.

10. Water Bottle Bees: When it’s hot out, bees gather water to cool the hive down. Some water will be stored in cells of honeycomb, but since this water evaporates quickly, some bees will act as living water bottles, holding water in their bodies until it is needed. 

11. Reverse aging: Scientists discovered that older honey bees reverse brain aging when they take on responsibilities in the hive typically handled by younger bees such as a forager having to revert back to the role of a nurse bee.

12. Piping, Tooting and Quacking: Queens are known to make a tooting noise when they first hatch. Queens still in their queen cell answer the tooting with a distinct piping sound, called “quacking”. Workers hearing the sound might try to keep the queen separate in case the others needed. Worker bees also pipe in a variety of circumstances in both queenless and queenright colonies.