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Did you know?
That’s a staggering number! Cultivated plants often require this too. In fact, crops that depend on animal assisted pollination are five times more valuable to growers, with a higher return than those that do not. This often includes fruits.
Bees can be found in so many locations, not just your gardens and wildflower meadows. You can find bees in sand dunes, sea walls, gravel pits, quarries and other habitats.
Honeybees use movement to communicate with each other. It’s been called the waggle dance and they use position of the sun and their movements to tell other honeybees where a good source of food is. It took researchers two years to decode the waggle dance.
It has been discovered that bumblebees are able to distinguish their relatives, strangers or their own scent from their footprints. This helps them when they’re looking for food as they can tell which flowers have already been visited. This saves them time so they can busily buzz on to the next one.
Bees have been producing honey for over 150 million years. But did you know that Honeybees collect about 20kg of pollen every year. Each trip is about 20mg, so that’s 1 million trips!
Bees fly the equivalent of 2.2 times around the world to make 450g of honey.
Worker honeybees can fly at 15-20 mph when looking for flowers, and then slow down to 12 mph when they’re laden with nectar, pollen or water.
Beeswax is a wax secreted from the underside of bee abdomens. This is harvested by the worker bees and taken to the part of the hive that needs new wax to maintain the honeycomb.
Bee bread is a mixture of plant pollen and honey. Bees mould these into granules and store them in the honeycombs.
Propolis is also known as bee glue. It’s produced by mixing bee saliva and beeswax with substances excreted from trees and sap. The bees use it as sealant in the hive for small gaps. Neat.
Royal jelly is the food given to queen bee larvae. It’s a creamy white colour and made in the mouth glands of young bees. It is full of proteins and fatty acids so that the larva can develop into a fertile queen.
We’re not just sharing these amazing facts for fun. Bees and other pollinating insects are vital for the entire ecosystem. The more people know and are aware of these fascinating creatures the better equipped we are to protect them on a large scale.
During our research we found out that honeybees do not actually hibernate. Instead they cluster together like the penguins we see on the Attenborough documentaries, using their bodies to generate heat and taking turns to be on the colder edges of the hive.
So although we won’t see bees over the next few months as the weather turns colder, we still need to remember how vital they are as we plan our gardens or outdoor spaces for the spring.
Think about introducing some bee friendly plants and flowers and consider any chemicals you’re applying to your garden. Our biostimulant range reduces the need for indiscriminate pesticides whilst simultaneously boosting the health of your plants. It is super bee friendly and can help you create a haven for many bee species and other insects.
Plan ahead for a bee-friendly paradise and check out our full range below.
Sources:
https://www.wwf.org.uk/learn/fascinating-facts/bees https://www.bbka.org.uk/pages/faqs/category/bee-facts
