Honeybees: Fun Facts On Our Pollinator Pals

We hope you’ve had the chance to check out Livable Buckhead’s honeybee hives in North Buckhead. If you haven’t yet, what are you waiting for? We promise our pollinator pals are friendly. They were brought to 684 Mountain Drive, just across the street from Mountain Way Common, last year and have been a fun addition to this local park.

Below, we give you the lowdown on our friendly pals and answer some common questions about honeybees.

What do bees do in the winter?

Unlike you and me, honeybees can’t wrap up in a warm blanket and curl in front of the fireplace to stay warm and cozy during the wintertime. So to stay warm, they retreat to their hives and stick closely in a cluster to keep warm. To survive, the honeybees must also have enough honey stored to eat throughout the winter months.

Are all bees mean?

Now we know what you may be thinking… bees?! Aren’t they dangerous to be around? Not to worry, and we’re here to set the record straight. Honeybees are typically very gentle insects. They only sting when provoked – unlike the much more aggressive yellow jacket, which is what most people get stung by. Honeybees die when they sting, so they only use their stingers as a last resort when needed for defense. This can happen if they are swatted or stepped on. They may also “bump” into you as a gentle warning that you’re getting too close for comfort for them.

Why is local honey good for allergies?

Local honey may help reduce seasonal allergy symptoms. That’s because bees pollinate flowers from their local environment, so when you eat their honey you’re ingesting local pollen. As a result, you may become less sensitive to this pollen over time and experience fewer seasonal allergy symptoms.

What causes bees to swarm?

Honeybees swarm so they may form new colonies. When a honeybee colony outgrows its home, or their hive becomes too congested or too populated for the queen’s pheromones to control the entire colony, that’s the bees’ signal that it is time to swarm.

How long is a honeybee’s lifespan?

The life span of worker honeybees ranges from five to seven weeks. The first few weeks of a worker’s life are spent working within the hive, while the last weeks are spent foraging for food and gathering pollen or nectar.

Meanwhile, queens, who spend their lives laying eggs inside the hive, live for an average of two to three years, and have been known to live up to five years.

How far from the hive will a bee travel?

Most foraging is done within a mile or two of the hive. However, foraging honeybees can fly 4 miles or more from their hive to collect pollen and nectar.

What are the jobs and roles in a hive?

Queens are responsible for laying eggs and producing worker bees. A healthy queen is capable of laying 3,000 eggs per day – that’s more than her own body weight in eggs in one day!

Worker bees, on the other hand, have many different roles in the hive. Young worker bees act as nurse bees: they nurture and feed bee larvae. Then they’ll take on the job of processing incoming nectar, feeding the queen, and making and capping the honey. Older worker bees will leave the hive to collect the necessary resources from which the colony survives.

How is a queen chosen/made?

All fertilized eggs have the potential to become a queen, but the larvae selected to become queens receive more royal jelly throughout development. Royal jelly is a sweet, protein-rich secretion from the glands of worker bees.

Each colony can be ruled by only one queen at a time. When a virgin queen emerges, she locates other virgin queens and eliminates them one at a time. In the event that two virgin honeybee queens emerge simultaneously, they fight each other to the death.