10 incredible facts about bees

We all know that hives are lorded over by a mighty queen bee who lays most of the eggs that become the other bees in the colony. But she’s not the only empowered female in the hive. Worker bees are also all female, and they do pretty much everything in the hive. They nurse the young, make the comb, and become field and scout bees who collect pollen and food. Meanwhile, the male bees, drones, mostly just mate with the queen, and then get kicked out when winter comes and food gets scarce. Sorry, dudes.

Drones are born from unfertilized eggs, meaning they have no fathers and get all of their genetic material from their mother, the queen. This means they’re haploid—that is, they have only one set of chromosomes—whereas the worker bees are diploid, meaning they come from fertilized eggs and have two sets of chromosomes. However, every now and then, a fertilized egg turns into a male bee, or a diploid drone, and when this happens, the worker bees find them and eat them as soon as they hatch.

As mentioned, worker bees take on many different roles throughout their lives. But they don’t just change jobs—they change their actual brain chemistry. A study has shown that when a bee goes from being a nurse to a forager, her brain chemistry actually changes, and different proteins are being expressed.

Like people, bees shiver to get warm, but unlike people, bees use this ability to work together and heat an entire hive. When a beehive starts to drop beneath normal temperatures, all the bees vibrate their flight muscles without moving their wings, which raises their body temperatures and the temperature of the hive.

This sounds like some sci-fi invention, but it’s true. Scientists from Arizona State University found that sometimes older bees have to take on roles that are usually filled by much younger bees (for example, a food gatherer goes back to being a nursery worker), and when this happens, the molecular structure of their brains change, and they become able to do things the younger bees can do. Some researchers hope that by learning about this effect in bees, we can use it to prevent dementia in people.

Only when a hive pulls together do bees create a lot of honey. A single bee produces only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. (We bet that really makes you appreciate a jar of honey.)

Don’t wrong a bee—it will remember your face. A report in the Journal of Experimental Biology says that bees can put together an impression of a face from the various parts. The researchers then put down pictures of human faces, some with sugar water on them and some without, and the bees remembered which faces had sugar water.

Worker bees show each other where food is by dancing. It’s called the waggle dance, and it’s shockingly precise.

They may not be consciously aware of it, but bees have solved some complex mathematical problems. Scientists have discovered that bees take the shortest possible route between flowers. In other words, instead of flying randomly from flower to flower, bees figure out how to do the least possible amount of total flying and get it all done as efficiently as possible. Sounds like they have planning and problem-solving skills superior to some people's.

Not only are bees amazing, but so are their hives. In 1999, mathematician Thomas Hales proved that a honeycomb (or hexagonal grid) is the most efficient way to create a structure of a certain size while using the least wax. Pretty impressive.