City Chicks & City Bees

There are around 270 different types of bee in Britain.

22 Bumble bees, 1 honey bee and over 250 species of solitary bees.

The honey bee (Apis Mellifera) is the only bee that makes significant quantities of honey that can be harvested for humans to eat.

Each hive has a queen bee, she is the mother of all the bees.

She can lay 3000 eggs per day.

Queen bees do not have a barb on their sting so can sting more than once.

New queen bees, sometimes before they emerge from their queen cell, pipe and quack to other queen bees.

The first queen that emerges may chew a hole in the side of other queen bee cells and sting the other queen to death.

For a swarm to leave a hive the queen bee is not fed for 3 days so she is light enough to fly.

There are three other types of bee in a hive a nurse bee which becomes a worker bee after two weeks and a male bee called a drone.

Bees visit 2 million flowers and fly about 55,000 miles to make a 1 lb jar of honey.