Honeybee Facts for Kids

The Hive

• Bees live in a hive, and the family of bees in one hive is known as a colony. There will be more than 60,000 bees in each colony. The colony is made up of one queen bee, worker bees and drones. The job of the queen is to lay eggs to produce more bees. The worker bees are the ones we see flying outside of the hive collecting pollen, and they are always female. The drones are the male bees that usually stay in the nest. Bees recognize their own hive by smell.

Body

• Bees have five eyes -- two large eyes and three smaller ones. The skeleton of a bee is on the outside of its body, and the body is made up of three sections -- the head, the thorax and the abdomen. The thorax contains the legs and wings, and the abdomen contains the stomach and stinger. They have six legs, and the back set of legs have special baskets made of hairs, which are used for carrying pollen in. The bee's stinger is used for protection, and some types of bees die after they use their stinger.

Honey

• Bees collect pollen and nectar from flowers to make honey, and as they do this they pollinate the flowers, which helps the plants produce new seeds for new plants. The reason they make honey is to feed their young and to help the colony survive the winter. However, one worker bee will only make half a teaspoon of honey in its entire life. Honey is also good for humans because it contains water, minerals and vitamins. It is also the only food in the world that is made by insects and eaten by humans.

Flight

• One worker bee will visit between 60 and 100 flowers each time she leaves the hive to collect pollen. She can often fly three miles or more on one of these collection trips and can fly at a speed faster than 6 mph. Bees have two sets of wings to help them fly and these flap more than 11,000 times a minute. This fast flapping is what makes the buzzing sound.