Honey bee

Tiny, but it feeds the world

A honey bee collects sweet nectar from flowers and makes honey. For one spoon of honey, a bee visits 4,000 flowers! A bee tells other bees where the flowers are with a 'dance'. Without bees there would be no apples, cherries or cucumbers — they pollinate the flowers.

The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is a social insect living in colonies of 20,000–60,000: one queen (up to 2,000 eggs a day), thousands of female workers and hundreds of drones. A worker's 'waggle dance' communicates the direction and distance of flowers — one of the most complex 'languages' in the animal world. A third of human food depends on pollinators. For 1 kg of honey, bees visit 4 million flowers and fly 150,000 km. Uzbekistan has a strong beekeeping tradition; mountain honey from the Fergana Valley and Tashkent region is famous.

Fun facts

• One bee makes just 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its whole life.
• A bee beats its wings 200 times a second — that's the buzz.
• Bees see colours but not red — and they can see ultraviolet!