Bee Facts For Kids (Amazing Honey Makers)

Bees are some of the hardest-working animals on the planet! These fuzzy, buzzing insects make honey, build incredible wax homes, and dance to tell their friends where to find the best flowers. Without bees, we would not have many of the fruits and vegetables we love to eat! A single honeybee visits up to 5,000 flowers in a single day. Bumblebees can fly in rain and cold weather that keeps other insects grounded. With over 20,000 bee species buzzing around the world, these tiny heroes keep our gardens blooming and our tables full. Let's find out what makes bees so amazing!

What Do Bees Look Like?

Bees are furry flying insects with six legs and two pairs of wings! Most bees have yellow and black stripes, but some are all black, brown, or even metallic green or blue! Sweat bees shimmer like tiny jewels. Bees have large compound eyes made of thousands of tiny lenses and three simple eyes on top of their heads for detecting light. Their bodies are covered in fuzzy hairs that collect pollen as they visit flowers!

Honeybees are the most famous bees, but bumblebees are the big, round, fluffy ones! Bumblebees are larger and fuzzier than honeybees, which helps them stay warm in cold weather. Mason bees are small, dark bees that nest in holes in wood. Carpenter bees are large and shiny. Leafcutter bees cut perfect circles from leaves to line their nests. Each bee species looks a little different, but they all share the same basic bee body plan!

Bees have amazing body parts designed for their jobs! Their back legs have special "pollen baskets"—flat, hairy areas where they pack pollen to carry back to the hive. Their tongues are long, tube-shaped straws perfect for sipping nectar from deep inside flowers. Honeybees have a special honey stomach separate from their regular stomach where they carry nectar. Worker bees also have a stinger for defense, which is actually a modified egg-laying tube!

Where Do Bees Live?

Bees live on every continent except Antarctica! Honeybees build wax hives in hollow trees, rock crevices, or beekeeper boxes. Wild honeybee colonies can contain 20,000 to 80,000 bees! Bumblebees nest underground in old mouse burrows or under tufts of grass, with colonies of just 50 to 500 bees. Mason bees and leafcutter bees are solitary—each female builds her own tiny nest in holes or hollow stems!

About 90 percent of bee species are solitary, meaning they live alone! Only honeybees, bumblebees, and a few other species live in social colonies. Solitary bees do not make honey or live in hives. Instead, each female digs a small tunnel or finds a hole, fills it with pollen and nectar, lays an egg, and seals it up. Mining bees dig tunnels in sandy soil. Blue orchard bees nest in reeds and hollow sticks!

Bees live in many different habitats! Desert bees survive in hot, dry areas by timing their activity to match when desert flowers bloom. Mountain bumblebees live at altitudes above 14,000 feet. Tropical bees buzz through rainforest canopies all year round. Some stingless bees build their hives inside termite mounds! Bees can live anywhere there are flowers, and they are found in forests, meadows, deserts, cities, and gardens around the world!

What Do Bees Eat?

Bees eat nectar and pollen from flowers! Nectar is a sweet liquid that gives bees energy—it is like bee fuel! Pollen is a powder that provides protein, vitamins, and minerals. Worker honeybees visit 50 to 1,000 flowers on each trip and can make 10 or more foraging trips per day. A single honeybee may visit 5,000 flowers in one day! All that flying and flower visiting adds up to a huge amount of pollination!

Honeybees turn nectar into honey! A worker bee sips nectar from a flower and stores it in her honey stomach. Back at the hive, she passes the nectar to a house bee, who chews it and adds special enzymes. Then the bees fan the nectar with their wings to evaporate the water. When it is thick enough, they cap the honeycomb cell with wax. It takes about 556 worker bees visiting 2 million flowers to make just 1 pound of honey!

Baby bees eat special food! Newborn bee larvae are fed "royal jelly"—a protein-rich substance produced by worker bees. After three days, most larvae switch to a diet of pollen and honey. But larvae that are fed royal jelly for their entire development become queens instead of workers! This is how the colony creates a new queen when needed. The food a baby bee eats literally determines what it grows up to be!

Cool Facts About Bees

• The waggle dance: Honeybees have their own language—and it is a dance! When a forager bee finds a great flower patch, she returns to the hive and performs a "waggle dance" on the honeycomb. The direction she dances tells the other bees which direction to fly. The length of her waggle tells them how far away the flowers are. The intensity of the dance shows how good the flowers are! This dancing language won Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize in 1973!
• Honey makers: Honeybees are the only insects that make food people eat! A single honeybee makes only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime. But a whole colony working together can make 60 to 100 pounds of honey per year! Honey never spoils—scientists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still perfectly good to eat. Honey has natural antibacterial properties and has been used as medicine for thousands of years!
• Perfect engineers: Honeybees build their combs from beeswax in perfect hexagonal (six-sided) cells! Hexagons are the most efficient shape—they use the least wax while holding the most honey. Bees produce wax from special glands on their abdomens. It takes about 8 pounds of honey to produce just 1 pound of beeswax. The temperature inside a hive stays at exactly 95 degrees Fahrenheit—bees fan their wings to cool it or huddle together to warm it!
• Super pollinators: Bees are the world's most important pollinators! They pollinate about one-third of the food we eat, including apples, almonds, blueberries, cherries, cucumbers, and watermelons. Without bees, these foods would become extremely rare and expensive. Bees also pollinate crops that feed farm animals. The value of bee pollination to agriculture is estimated at over $15 billion per year in the United States alone!
• Speed and endurance: Bees are impressive flyers! Honeybees can fly at speeds up to 15 mph and beat their wings 200 times per second—that is what creates the buzzing sound! A foraging bee may fly 5 miles from the hive to find flowers. In her lifetime, a single worker bee flies about 500 miles—enough to circle a city many times over. Bumblebees can fly in rain and temperatures as low as 50 degrees Fahrenheit!
• Hive teamwork: A honeybee colony is an amazing team! The queen is the only bee that lays eggs—up to 2,000 per day! Worker bees (all female) do every job: nursing babies, building comb, guarding the entrance, cleaning, and foraging. Drones (males) have only one job—to mate with queens from other hives. Workers live about 6 weeks in summer. Queens can live 3 to 5 years. The whole colony works as one super-organism!
• Bee brains: Bees are surprisingly smart for animals with brains the size of sesame seeds! They can learn to recognize human faces. They can count up to four. Honeybees understand the concept of zero—something many animals cannot grasp. Bumblebees can learn to pull strings to get rewards and even teach the trick to other bees. Bees also have excellent memories and can remember flower locations for days!
• Buzzing heaters: Honeybees can heat themselves up by vibrating their flight muscles! When a predatory hornet enters a Japanese honeybee hive, hundreds of bees swarm it and vibrate their muscles to create a "hot bee ball" that reaches 117 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to cook the hornet! Bees also use this heat-generating ability to keep the hive warm in winter. A winter cluster of bees maintains a temperature of about 93 degrees even when it is freezing outside!

Baby Bee Facts

The queen bee lays all the eggs in the colony! She can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day during peak season—that is one egg every 43 seconds! She carefully places each egg into a wax cell that worker bees have prepared. Fertilized eggs become female workers or queens. Unfertilized eggs become male drones. The queen can control which type of egg she lays!

Bee babies go through four life stages! First they are tiny white eggs (3 days). Then they hatch into larvae—blind, legless grubs that eat constantly (6 days). Next they spin a cocoon and become pupae, transforming inside their sealed cells (12 days for workers). Finally, they chew through the wax cap and emerge as adult bees! The entire process from egg to adult takes about 21 days for a worker bee!

Nurse bees take care of the babies! Young worker bees spend their first few days as nurses, feeding and checking on the larvae thousands of times. Each larva is fed about 1,300 times per day! Nurse bees produce royal jelly from glands in their heads to feed the youngest larvae. The larvae grow incredibly fast—a bee larva increases its weight 1,500 times in just 5 days. That would be like a human baby growing to the weight of a van!

When a colony needs a new queen, the bees raise one! Workers build special larger cells and feed the chosen larvae nothing but royal jelly. This special diet triggers the larva to develop into a queen instead of a worker. The first new queen to emerge often stings the other queen cells to eliminate competition. Then she takes a mating flight, returns to the hive, and begins her life's work of laying eggs!

Why Are Bees Important?

Bees are essential for our food supply! They pollinate over 100 crop species that together make up about one-third of everything we eat. Without bees, we would lose apples, almonds, avocados, blueberries, cherries, coffee, peaches, strawberries, and many more foods. Even foods like beef and dairy depend on bees because the clover and alfalfa that cows eat needs bee pollination to grow!

Bees keep wild ecosystems healthy! They pollinate wildflowers that provide food and habitat for other animals. Forest trees, meadow flowers, and desert plants all depend on bee pollination. When bee populations decline, entire plant communities suffer, which affects every animal that depends on those plants. Bees are a keystone species—their impact on the environment is far greater than their tiny size suggests!

Bee populations face serious challenges! Pesticides, habitat loss, diseases, and parasites like the varroa mite have caused bee populations to decline in many areas. Colony collapse disorder has affected honeybee hives around the world. Planting bee-friendly flowers, avoiding pesticides, and supporting local beekeepers are some of the best ways to help bees. Even a small window box of flowers can provide food for visiting bees!

Bees have been valued by humans for thousands of years! Ancient Egyptians kept bees and used honey and beeswax. Honey was so precious it was used as currency. Today, beekeeping is practiced around the world, and bees provide honey, beeswax, and pollination services worth billions of dollars. By protecting bees and their habitats, we protect our food supply and the health of ecosystems everywhere!