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From honey to the bees – learn more about the remarkable secrets of the most iconic insect of the British summer.

• Worldwide, honey bees provide an annual honey crop of approximately one billion kilograms
• Each honey bee will produce about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime – probably the amount left on your knife after spreading honey on your toast
• 10 million foraging trips go into making one jar of honey, a distance of up to 50,000 miles – that’s equivalent to travelling twice around the globe!
• Honey has a virtually eternal shelf-life if kept sealed and apparently honey found in the pharaohs’ tombs in Egypt was still edible after 3,000 years

• A forager bee may visit 2,000 flowers a day to collect nectar and pollen
• The bees’ stomach is the size of a pinhead and to fill this once the bee may need to visit 100 flowers
• Bees fly at an average of 13 to 15 mph and can travel up to four miles away from their hive – sometimes more
• Bees also eat pollen and an average bee hive or colony consumes around 40 kilos a year
• A bee flaps its wings between 200 and 230 times per second when flying
• Each bee flies about 500 miles in its lifetime and if it is not eaten by a predator, the bee usually dies of exhaustion after about three weeks
• Any fertilised egg could turn into a queen rather than a worker and being fed royal jelly triggers this transformation
• Honey bee senses are impeccable: they can see ultraviolet light, have an amazing sense of smell, can detect electrical signals and the earth’s magnetic field
• Honey bees can count up to four and memorise landmarks to help them to learn where their hive is located
• The cells in a natural honey bee comb are initially circular but gradually take on the familiar hexagonal shape by a flow of the wax, which is turned semi-molten by the heat from specialist heater worker bees