I have written twice before about honey bees, stressing their importance in pollinating much of the food we eat, and how they have been in serious decline, most probably because of some of the modern agricultural practices.

However, I didn't realise how little I knew about them until I visited the new site for the bee hives of the Bradford Bee Keepers Association.

It’s almost custom-built as the hives now occupy a disused bowling green, protected by substantial fencing and mature hedges. They should be happy and productive, as long as we make sure there are more flowers and flowering trees in our parks and gardens.

Honey bees are the only insects that produce food eaten by man, so we shouldn’t take buying a pot of honey for granted as it depends on these fascinating little creatures being in good health and very busy. I hadn’t realised that:

  • Out of 20,000 species of bee, only four make honey.
  • A colony will have a queen, about 50,000 worker females and some 2,000 drones (males), whose sole job is to fertilise the queen. Their gender or status depends on the food they eat as they are all born the same. The queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs each day, and she can live up to five years l All the work inside the hive is done by the females, cleaning, guarding the entrance, looking after the young, making the honey combs, sorting out the honey and feeding the queen. After three weeks hard labour, they go outside to collect nectar.
  • There, these worker females spend three weeks foraging, up to three miles from the hive, buzzing along at 15mph, and visiting 1,000 flowers to fill their nectar sacs.
  • Each bee will collect about a 12th of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime, and it takes about two million flowers to make a pound of honey.
  • The poor workers die after three weeks outside, absolutely shattered as their wings beat at more than 11,000 times a minute, and none of the bees ever sleep.
  • The male drones contribute very little and are killed off by the female workers before the end of the summer.
  • Unlike most bees, honey ones don’t hibernate, and in winter they cluster and circle together in the hive around the queen to keep the temperature up to 37 degrees, rather like the Emperor penguins in the Antarctic.
  • Nearly all UK beekeeping is carried out by amateurs and there are very few wild colonies left.

The next time I hear buzzing, and a bee gently settles on a flower, I will be very impressed and thankful.