Learning honey bee facts with your family teaches your children to appreciate the importance of bees. Honey bees pollinate flowers, fruits, and vegetables. They are imperative for our survival. There are 20,000 species of bees, and 4,000 of those species contribute to pollination.
Discover Honey Bee Facts on World Honey Bee Day on August 20
Celebrate World Honey Bee Day on August 20th with honey bee facts, festivals, or by sharing a story about honey bees. According to National Today, World Honey Bee Day recognizes both honey bees and the beekeepers who tend to them. National Honey Bee Day was established in 2009 by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Thomas J. Vilsek to be the third Saturday in August. You can celebrate World Honey Bee Day by planting flowers to attract bees to your flower and vegetable gardens, learning about bees, and enjoying delicious treats made with honey.
Just the Honey Bee Facts
Honey bees are fascinating insects known for their teamwork. A honey bee colony may have as many as 60,000 bees during late spring or early summer, according to the American Bee Journal.
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The queen bee lives up to three years and lays up to 2,500 eggs a day during the warm summer months. For the rest of the queen’s life, she lays between 600-1,500 eggs a day. Worker honey bees live for about 4 weeks in the spring and up to 6 months in the winter. Honey bees fly for up to 6 miles. They visit 50 to 100 flowers during a pollen collection trip.
Honey bees are the only insect to produce food eaten by humans – honey. Bees produce in excess of 150 million pounds of honey each year in the United States. Honey is 80 percent sugar and 20 percent water. However, “honey bees pollinate more than 80 percent of all flowering plants, including more than 130 types of fruits and vegetables” that humans eat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These foods include apples, cranberries, melons, almonds, broccoli, blueberries, cherries, and more.
The Bee Cause Project Teaches Honey Bee Facts
The Savannah Bee Company created the nonprofit Bee Cause Project in 2013 to create observation-based learning for students in their classrooms so they can learn honey bee facts firsthand. Lifelong beekeeper and Savannah Bee Company’s founder Ted Dennard, and Tami Enright, a fellow beekeeper, and environmental educator, devote their lives to protecting pollinators. The beekeepers installed the first observation hive at Sullivan’s Island Elementary School in South Carolina. Since then, The Bee Cause Project has awarded Bee Grants to more than 650 schools installing indoor observation hives and traditional Langstroth hives so students around the country can enjoy learning honey bee facts.
Learn Honey Bee Facts at Festivals Around the Country
Those who want to learn about honey bees celebrate and have some fun can swarm together at one of the various honey bee festivals around the country. Local Honey Finder not only helps you find local honey for sale near your home but also can help you find a honey festival, near you or one for you to build a vacation around.
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The Hahira Honeybee Festival in Hahira, Georgia, was started more than 40 years ago by Mamie Sorrell and Adeline Landrum. The weekend festival has grown into a weeklong event with a parade, arts and crafts, entertainment, and food. This 41st annual Hahira Honeybee Festival is from Sept. 27 to Oct. 2, 2022. The festival has drawn up to 36,000 visitors in the past.
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The 2022 Lithopolis Honeyfest is Sept. 9-10, 2022 in Lithopolis, Ohio. The festival boasts a honey competition, photography competition, arts and crafts, music, entertainment, and more. Don’t miss the Bee Beards at the Lithopolis Honeyfest – it is exactly what it sounds like. You will not want to miss the “Bee Beards.” The festival also features a honey bake-off, honey extracting, hive inspection, junior beekeeping, mead (honey wine) tasting, and an American Honey Queen competition. Festival-goers will meet beekeepers, and learn all about honey bees.
Project Honey Bee
Another way to celebrate World Honey Bee Day is to “adopt” a honey bee by sporting some adorable honey bee jewelry. Project Honey Bees partners with Cornell University, a leader in pollinator research and education, to raise funds for bee research through its jewelry. Researchers at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) are focused on figuring out why bee colonies have declined in recent years while creating ways to protect the honey bees. Each purchase helps spread awareness and aid in honey bee conservation. You can support the research at Cornell with a bee necklace, earrings, bracelet, or pin.
Learning honey bee facts with your kiddos is a terrific way to celebrate World Honey Bee Day. Your quest to learn more can lead you on a journey to meet a local beekeeper. And, of course, you will want to conduct your own honey taste test. Grab a few jars of honey from the grocery store, and a few from your local beekeeper to see if you can taste the different flowers used to create nature’s sweet nectar.
Sources: American Bee Journal, Lithopolis Honeyfest, Local Honey Finder, Hahira Honeybee Festival, National Today, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Project Honey Bees, The Bee Cause Project, and Savannah Bee Company.
Photo Credit: Pexels and Carla Eskew.
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