Honey is nectar that bees have repeatedly regurgitated and dehydrated

A single hive contains approximately 40,000-45,000 bees

'One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees ...'
- Leo Tolstoy

Honeybees can perceive movements that are separated by 1/300th of a second. Humans can only sense movements separated by 1/50th of a second. Were a bee to watch a film, it would be able to differentiate each individual movie frame being projected.

Ant colonies can have many queens

A queen can lay her weight in eggs in one day and 200,000 eggs in a year

Bees possess five eyes

The queen mates in flight with approximately 18 drones. She only mates once in her lifetime

'The most laborious of all insects, if compared with the rest, are the tribes of ants and bees.'
- Aristotle

Screening hives for hygienic ability by freezing patches of brood with liquid nitrogen

Honeybees communicate with one another by 'dancing' so as to give the direction and distance of flowers

The Varroa mite is a major pest species of the honey bee

European foul brood can devastate a hive

In the course of her lifetime, a worker bee will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey

To make one pound of honey, workers in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers

'For so work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.'
- William Shakespeare

'The little bee returns with evening's gloom, To join her comrades in the braided hive, Where, housed beside their might honey-comb, They dream their polity shall long survive.'
- Alfred Tennyson

'Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise'
- Proverbs 6:6

Honeybees' stingers have a barb anchoring the stinger in the victim's body. The bee leaves its stinger and venom pouch behind and soon dies from abdominal rupture

'The bee's life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.'
- Karl Von Frisch

Staff and volunteers create an out-apiary on a University experimental field

The only function of drones (male bees) is to mate with the queen

A queen can lay her weight in eggs in one day and 200,000 eggs in a year

Honeybees' stingers have a barb which anchors the stinger in the victim's body. The bee leaves its stinger and venom pouch behind and soon dies from abdominal rupture

Bees cannot recognise the colour red