Honey Bee Facts for Kids

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Honey bees are insects that live together in big families called colonies. One colony can have more than 50,000 bees in summer. They work as a team to collect food from flowers, raise baby bees and make honey. Here are the most important honey bee facts for kids, written for readers about 8 to 12 years old.

For parents and teachers: each section is short enough to read aloud in a couple of minutes. There is a fun-facts table near the end and a safety section every child should read. Older readers who want more detail can move on to our 30 surprising facts about bees.

What is a honey bee?

A honey bee is a small, fuzzy insect, about half an inch long. Like all insects, it has six legs and three body parts: a head, a middle part called the thorax, and a back part called the abdomen. It has four wings and two antennae it uses to smell and feel.

Honey bees have five eyes. Two big ones on the sides of the head see shapes and colors. Three tiny ones on top help the bee sense light. Bees can see ultraviolet light, which people cannot see, but they cannot see the color red.

There are about 20,000 kinds of bees in the world, but only a few make honey. You can read about the others in types of bees.

The colony: a bee family

Honey bees cannot live alone. They live in a colony, which is like a very big family where every bee has a job. Wild colonies live inside hollow trees. Colonies that beekeepers look after live in wooden boxes called hives.

Inside, bees build honeycomb out of wax that they make with their own bodies. The comb is made of thousands of little six-sided rooms called cells. Bees use the cells to store honey and pollen and to raise baby bees. Want to know how many bees share one hive? See how many honeybees live in a colony.

Queen, workers and drones

A colony has three kinds of bees.

The queen

There is only one queen in a colony. She is the biggest bee and has a long body. Her job is to lay eggs, and she is very good at it: in spring and summer she can lay up to about 1,500 eggs in a single day. The queen does not give orders. The colony takes care of her, feeding and cleaning her. A queen can live for two to three years, sometimes longer. Learn more about the queen bee’s role.

Worker bees

Almost every bee in the colony is a worker, and all workers are girls. They do all the jobs, and a worker’s job changes as she gets older:

• Cleaner: young bees start by cleaning cells.
• Nurse: next they feed the baby bees, called larvae.
• Builder: they make wax and build comb.
• Guard: they stand at the door and keep out bees from other hives.
• Forager: in the last part of her life, a worker flies out to collect nectar, pollen and water.

In summer a worker bee lives about six weeks. She works so hard that her wings wear out. Workers born in autumn live much longer, often all winter.

Drones

Drones are the boy bees. They are bigger and chunkier than workers, with huge eyes that touch at the top of the head. Drones do not collect food or clean, and they have no stinger at all. Their one job is to mate with a young queen from another colony. In autumn, when food gets scarce, the workers push the drones out of the hive.

How bees make honey

Honey starts as nectar, a sweet, watery juice inside flowers. Here is how bees turn it into honey:

1. A forager bee sucks up nectar with her long, straw-like tongue and stores it in a special honey stomach.
2. Back at the hive, she passes the nectar to a younger bee, mouth to mouth.
3. The bees add enzymes, special helpers from their bodies, that change the nectar’s sugars.
4. They spread the nectar in the cells and fan it with their wings to dry it out. Nectar is mostly water; honey is only about 18% water.
5. When the honey is thick enough, the bees cover each cell with a wax lid called a cap.

Honey is the bees’ food for winter, when there are no flowers. Beekeepers only take the extra honey the colony does not need.

While bees visit flowers, yellow dust called pollen sticks to their fuzzy bodies. Some of it rubs off on the next flower, which helps the plant make seeds and fruit. This is called pollination, and it is one of the most useful things bees do for people and nature.

The waggle dance: how bees give directions

When a forager finds lots of good flowers, she goes back to the hive and does a dance to tell her sisters where they are. It is called the waggle dance.

• She walks in a straight line while wiggling her body from side to side, then loops back and does it again.
• The direction of the straight line tells the other bees which way to fly compared to the sun.
• The length of the waggle tells them how far to go. About one second of waggling means the flowers are roughly a kilometer (a bit more than half a mile) away.

The dance happens in the dark inside the hive, so the other bees follow it by touch and by feeling the vibrations. A scientist named Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in 1973 partly for working out what the dance means.

Fun honey bee facts table

Do honey bees sting?

Only worker bees and the queen have stingers, and honey bees sting only to protect themselves or their hive. A foraging bee on a flower is busy and does not want to sting you.

A worker’s stinger has tiny hooks called barbs. When she stings a person, the stinger gets stuck in the skin and pulls out of her body, and the bee dies. That is why a honey bee stings only as a last resort. Wasps and bumble bees have smooth stingers and can sting more than once.

Safety around bees

Bees are helpful, and most of the time they leave people alone. These simple rules keep everyone safe:

• Stay calm and still if a bee flies near you. Do not swat it. Waving your arms makes bees feel attacked.
• Walk away slowly if a bee keeps flying around you.
• Never touch or poke a hive or a cluster of bees. Tell an adult if you find one.
• Wear shoes on grass with clover or dandelions, where bees feed.
• Look before you sip from an open can or cup outside; bees like sweet drinks.
• Keep away from hive entrances. That is where guard bees are.

If you get stung

1. Tell an adult straight away.
2. Scrape the stinger out quickly with a fingernail or the edge of a card. Speed matters more than the method.
3. Wash the spot with soap and water and hold something cold on it to help with swelling.

A sting hurts and the skin usually gets red, swollen and itchy for a day or two. That is normal. For adults: call 911 at once if a child has trouble breathing, swelling of the face, lips or throat, hives spreading over the body, dizziness or vomiting after a sting. These can be signs of a serious allergic reaction. If your child has reacted badly to a sting before, talk to your doctor about allergy testing and whether to carry an epinephrine auto-injector.

Interested in going further? Many families keep bees together. See how to get your kids involved in beekeeping.

Frequently asked questions

How long do honey bees live?

A worker bee lives about six weeks in summer and several months in winter. Drones live a few weeks to a few months. A queen can live two to three years, or sometimes longer.

Why do bees make honey?

Honey is food the colony stores for winter and for rainy days when bees cannot fly. A strong colony makes more than it needs, and that extra honey is what beekeepers collect.

Do all bees make honey?

No. Out of about 20,000 kinds of bees, only honey bees and a small number of others, such as stingless bees in warm countries, store honey. Most bees live alone and never make honey at all.

What do honey bees eat?

Adult bees eat nectar and honey for energy. Baby bees are fed a mix of pollen, honey and a milky food that nurse bees make, called royal jelly or brood food. Pollen gives them protein to grow.

Why do bees buzz?

The buzz is the sound of a bee’s wings beating about 230 times every second. The wings move so fast that you cannot see them clearly, only hear them.