Buzz, Buzz: Interesting Honey Bee Facts You Should Know

The first thing you should know about bees is that, in every hive, there are three crucial types of bees. The most numerous are the worker bees. They are entirely female, and there are about 60,000 of them in any hive.

As the name suggests, they are the ones who do all of the work around the hive. They each have a job, like scouting, pollen collecting, building, and nursing. That job changes based on the bee's age.

Next is the queen bee. She's the most important bee in the hive because she's the only fertile female. Her only job is to keep creating bees to replenish the worker population. She can live for years, much longer than the average worker.

Finally, the least common bees are the males, the drones. Drones have one purpose, which is to fertilize the queen. Drones get a bad rap for being "lazy" around the hive. Compared to the worker bees, who are endlessly busy, drones tend to wait for their time to come.

But they are only made for breeding -- so much so that after they mate, they die.

These three bees all work together to make the hive work like a well-oiled machine.

Queen bees don't have a royal lineage. Of course, every queen bee comes from another queen, but there's nothing special about the larval queen when it's born.

When a larva is chosen to be a queen, it is exclusively fed a substance known as royal jelly. Normal worker bees are fed a mix of honey and fermented pollen. For a long time, we thought that royal jelly made a larva become a queen. Now, we know that it's the other way around.

Queen bees are different because their ovaries are allowed to develop while they're still growing. The honey and pollen diet of worker bee larvae actually prevents these organs from developing. So, it's what the queen bee doesn't eat that's special.

Wrap your head around this:

A drone is born of an unfertilized egg. So, he doesn't have a dad, just a mom -- the queen. But, since the queen is a female, she is born of a fertilized egg. Which means she has a father.

So, no drone has a father. But they all have one grandfather. This is a little crazy for us to think about, but actually makes perfect sense when you think about it.

One of the most amazing things about bees is the way they see. Of course, they have two prominent compound eyes, which lets them see from yellow to ultraviolet. But you probably didn't know they have three simple eyes on top of their heads.

These simple eyes have a single lens for light reception. By using these eyes, bees can orient themselves based on the sun.

But it's that ultraviolet sight that shows that honey bees are perfectly adapted to their flower-seeking role. It lets them pick out individual petals on flowers that have the most sugar. And when they're flying past a bed of flowers (at 15 miles per hour), they can see every single one!

A swarm of honey bees sounds scary, but this is actually about as safe as you'll ever be around honey bees.

When a hive is growing too large, a new queen is born. She takes about half of the workers, and they go off to find a new place to start their hive. Outside of the hive, bees are much less defensive. Additionally, they feed before leaving, so they are less prone to sting.

If you see a swarm, don't worry. They're just looking for a new home.

The queen sounds like she's the one in charge, but she actually doesn't run the hive. Worker bees know their jobs like they've had years of experience, so they actually direct what eggs the queen lays and where.

They do this by cleaning out cells corresponding to the bee they need. If they need to make drones, they clean out the drone cells. This signals the queen to lay unfertilized eggs to make male bees. So, even though she's the queen, she's not the one who calls all the shots.

Power to the workers.

Honey bees have to make sure everything is perfect within the hive. They keep it at 93 degrees inside year-round, either by fanning it with their wings or clustering together for warmth.

They also hate clutter and debris. Worker bees will leave the hive to defecate, and even to die. It's common to see dead bees around the outside of domesticated hives. This keeps the interior of the hive clean and efficient.

There are some honey bee facts you can use to get your kids to clean their room.

Bees are also master architects. The hexagonal comb structure uses the least wax of any possible building structure, which we have believed for 2,000 years.

The hexagons in a honeycomb are also all perfect, as well. They are more precise than we could make them without tools.

You probably learned about the honey bee waggle dance when you were young. It's one of those cute honey bee facts that kids love.

When bees return to the hive, they dance in a figure-eight pattern to tell other bees where there is a good source of food. But did you know that the shape of the dance actually depends on how far the food is from the hive?

The figure-eight dance we all learn about is only for food that's more than 150 meters, or 500 feet, from the hive. (It can pinpoint a food source up to six kilometers, or almost four miles, away.) They also have a dance for food within 50 meters (160 feet), and for food that's in between the two.

Remember the simple eyes that honey bees use for navigation? It comes back here. The dance shows other bees where the food is based on the sun's orientation.

The oldest reference to humans collecting honey from bees dates back around 11,000 years. But it was a long time before we had records of people actually keeping bees.

The first indications of this are from around 5,000 years ago in Egypt and China. These ancient apiarists used hives and honeypots like we do today.

They also used smoke to put bees to sleep just like modern beekeepers. Sometimes you don't mess with what works.

Not every state has a state insect. Only 46 do, in fact. But a significant amount of states have the honey bee as at least one of their state insects. Sixteen different states picked the honey bee to represent their state.

This is mostly because of the honey bee's contributions to agriculture. There are many crops that completely rely on them for pollination. Tennessee designated the honey bee as their agricultural insect, one of four state insects.

With such a small package, you may be surprised at the advanced things a honey bee can do. One of the most incredible of these is that honey bees can recognize human faces.

The best part? They do it the same way we do.

We recognize faces through something called configural processing. This means that bees, like us, take the different components of the face and piece them together. Eyes, nose, and mouth all come together to make a face that bees will remember.