“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”
~ Albert Einstein
The birds and the bees mean a lot more to a designer than the average person, and that’s because bees are a designer’s dream. Let me explain why.
Today, people are just beginning to learn how integral bees are to our environment. Our ecosystem depends on them. We don’t need to look any deeper than the engineering and mathematics of the beehive to begin to see just how complex and intelligent bees are.
The honey combed shape hexagon prevents the loss of honey but the design perspective is extraordinary and stems from strong intelligent design that achieves many benefits.
The bees ability to communicate through dance lets other bees know where food is, what direction to go and how far away it is. Honestly, that is simply stunning. Humans strive to communicate with such precision and often a good design is the way to achieve this. Honey bees have their own highly organized and well-functioning society and they work with an intricate amount of communication and precision. It’s no wonder a colony is often referred to as a super-organism.
Little known facts:
- The honey bee has existed for millions of years and is the only insect that produces food eaten by humans.
- Honey is the only food that includes all of the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it’s the only food that contains “pinocembrin”, an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
- The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
- A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.
- It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
- A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
- A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen.
- Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.
- The queen bee can live up to 5 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day.
- Larger than the worker bees, the male honey bees (also called drones), have no stinger and do no work at all. All they do is mating. Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but they don’t leave the hive to help defend it.
- It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.