Honeybee facts

Pollination facts

​Honeybees live in colonies, or hives, with one queen running the whole hive. Worker honeybees are all females and are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside of the hive. They forage for food, build the honeycombs, and protect the hive.  

Honeybees are important pollinators for flowers, fruits, and vegetables. They live on stored honey and pollen all winter and cluster into a ball to conserve warmth. All honeybees are social and cooperative insects. 
There are three members of a honey bee colony:

• Queen - mother to all the bees in the colony; she is a fertile female.
• Worker - an infertile female that performs the labor tasks of the colony, including feed preparation, guarding the hive, feeding the queens, drones and brood, and heating and cooling the hive.
• Drone - the male that starts out as an unfertilized egg.  Its only purpose in the colony is to mate with a virgin queen.  They live to mate with the queen, but not more than one in a thousand get the opportunity to mate.

On average, a worker bee in the summer lasts six to eight weeks.  Their most common cause of death is wearing their wings out.  During that six to eight-week period, their average honey production is 1/12 of a teaspoon.  In that short lifetime, they fly the equivalent of 1 1/2 times the circumference of the earth.
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The peak population of a colony of honeybees is usually at mid-summer (after spring buildup) and results in 60,000 to 80,000 bees per colony.  A good, prolific queen can lay up to 3,000 eggs per day. When a queen is five to six days old, she is ready to mate. She puts out a pheromone scent to attract the males and takes off in the air.  The males from miles around smell the scent. Queens regulate the hive's activities by producing chemicals that guide the behavior of the other bees.

Honeybees contribute nearly $20 billion to the value of US crop production.  Many of the country's crops would not exist without honeybee.
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As honey bees gather pollen and nectar for their survival, they pollinate crops such as apples, cranberries, melons and broccoli. Some crops, including blueberries and cherries, are 90-percent dependent on honey bee pollination; one crop, almonds, depends entirely on the honey bee for pollination at bloom time.

For many others, crop yield and quality would be greatly reduced without honey bee pollination. In fact, a 2010 Cornell University study documented that the contribution made by managed honey bees hired by U.S. crop growers to pollinate crops amounted to over $19 billion. 

Each year American farmers and growers continue to feed more people using less land. They produce an abundance of food that is nutritious and safe. Honey bees are very much a part of this modern agricultural success story. It’s estimated that there are about 2.7 million colonies in the U.S. today, two-thirds of which travel the country each year pollinating crops and producing honey and beeswax. The California almond industry requires approximately 1.8 million colonies of honey bees in order to adequately pollinate nearly one million acres of bearing almond orchards.

The $20 billion contribution made by managed honey bees comes in the form of increased yields and superior quality crops for growers and American consumers — a healthy beekeeping industry is invaluable to a healthy U.S. agricultural economy.