- There are 101 bee species in Ireland: the honeybee, 22 species of bumblebee, and 78 species of solitary bee. There was great excitement in March 2022 when a new bee was spotted. The Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes) has migrated from Britain to set up home in Ireland for the first time since the ice age (probably!)
2. Bees are crucial for pollination for many foods. In Ireland crops such as apples, strawberries, raspberries, tomatoes, blackcurrants, peppers, courgettes and pumpkins are reliant on bees for pollination.
3. Worker honey bees can only sting once (and then they die.) Worker honeybees have a barbed sting. They can only sting mammals once as the sting catches in the skin and tears loose from the bees abdomen, leading to death in minutes.
4. Honeybees can be trained. In the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, Los Alamos scientists trained honeybees to recognize explosives. Honey bees natural reaction to nectar is to stick out their tongue. The Scientists trained them to do this when they detected explosives instead.
5. Only bumblebees can pollinate tomatoes. For example, tomatoes, the key to an incalculable number of delicious dishes, rely solely on bumblebees for pollination. This is because only bumblebees can perform buzz pollination, vibrating their bodies at exactly the right frequency to shake the pollen loose from the anthers of the tomato plant.
6. Queen Bees typically live for 2 to 3 years. Queens develop from an egg to a fully grown adult in just 16 days, while worker bees take 21. While summer worker bees live for only about 6 weeks, Queens can live for 2 up to 5 years
7. Queen Bees are home bodies. There is only one Queen Bee in the hive and she rarely leaves, once to mate and often only once to swarm.
8. Maiden Flights. The queen embarks on her “maiden flight” when she’s around 2 weeks old. There she mates with up to 20 male drones in mid-air, storing millions of sperm to fertilize eggs for the rest of her life.
9. Successful Drone Bees. A drone bees sole purpose in life is to mate with a queen. The 10-20 drones that succeed, must compete with hundreds or thousands of other drones, depending upon the population at the drone congregating area.
10. Drones afterwards, Look away if squeamish…the drone bees when they mate with a queen, it happens with such force that his endophallus is ripped from his abdomen. When his abdomen rips open he basically dies.
11. Layabout Drones. Drones are often considered “layabouts” when it comes to working around the hive. In comparison to the furious activity of worker bees, they don’t look after the baby bees, they don’t keep the hive tidy, they don’t fly out to forage. (Does this sound familiar?!) They don’t even feed themselves.
12. A worker bee gathers in her entire life 0.8 gram (0.0288 ounce) of honey. It requires 556 worker bees to gather a pound of honey. The average life of a honey bee during the working season is about six weeks and six weeks in winter.
13. Egg laying queens! At the peak of the season, a healthy queen can lay up to 3,000 eggs a day. This means she can lay more than her own body weight in eggs in a single 24-hour period.
14. Queens to battle. Unlike worker bees, who have barbed stingers and die after a single sting, a queen has a smooth stinger. She can sting multiple times without dying, but she reserves this weapon exclusively for fighting rival queens to the death. All very Game of Thrones.
15. Questions on gender. A queen has the power to decide the sex of her offspring. She lays unfertilized eggs to produce male drones and fertilized eggs to produce female worker bees.
16. Drones have a grandfather, but no father. Since drones come from an unfertilized egg, they only receive their genetic components from the queen. Yet, because the queen is female, her own egg was fertilized so she had a father – the drone’s grandfather.
17. How far and how fast. A honeybee can fly up to six miles if needed, particularly for water, and up to 15 mph. They can visit 2,000 flowers a day.
18. Worldwide bees. Bees are found in all countries in the world … except Antarctica
19. Colour spectrum. Bees have a completely unique and fascinating relationship with colour. Unlike humans, bees have trichromatic vision based on ultraviolet, blue, and green. They cannot see red, but they can see “bee’s purple,” a special combination of yellow and ultraviolet light.
20. Bee Waggle Dance. My favourite fact. When a forager bee finds a great patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs the famous “waggle dance”. This figure-eight movement tells the other bees the exact distance and direction of the food.
If you are interested in growing pollinator-friendly plants or learning more about how to support these populations, you can check out the resources provided by the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan.
If you want to start identifying bees, this is a useful resource for beginners https://pollinators.ie/record-pollinators/solitary-bees-for-beginners/