Beloved Bee Facts

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Image by Andreas Trepte on Wikimedia Commons

Beehives at Common Ground of Eastern North Carolina

Image by Дарья Яковлева from Pixabay

Greetings, Green-Eyed Gardeners! Did you know that Common Ground has 4 honeybee hives, and we produce honey for sale? Yep!

Here are our 7 favorite bee facts:

7. The queen bee lives for about 2-3 years. Imagine a toddler being a queen! She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs a day. [In the photo, the queen bee is tagged with the pink marker.]

6. In the summer, a beehive can have as many as 50,000 to 80,000 bees. That’s more bees in a single beehive than there are people in Lenoir County!

5. A honeybee must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey. The largest flower garden in the world, The Dubai Miracle Garden, would only produce around 12 pounds of honey.

4. Bees fly more than once around the world to gather a pound of honey. Strong hives can produce up to 100 pounds of honey. I guess that’s where the term busy bee comes from!
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​3. Bees hold the world title for best dancers. Honeybees do a dance that alerts other bees to the location of nectar and pollen by direction and distance.

2. Bees can be found living in some insane locations and at some astounding temperatures.  To name a few: marshes, sand dunes, soft cliffs, wetlands, quarries, gravel pits, and even sea walls. At Common Ground, we have wooden boxes for our bees.

1. Honeybees are the only insect in the world that makes food that humans can eat. And not coincidentally, they’re our favorite insects!

Remember to be kind to bees and other pollinators by not overusing insect-killing chemicals.