I took a beekeeping class in San Francisco and didn’t quite know what to expect. It was fascinating! Some fun facts I learned:

• There are three types of honey bees: the queen bee, the worker bee and the drone.
• The worker bees and drones live between 2-3 weeks. The queen bee lives between 2-3 years!
• The queen “chooses” whether to produce a drone or worker bee. If there is a surplus of honey, she produces drone bees, if she needs more honey she produces worker bees.
• A queen bee is produced when worker bees build a hive around the larva called “royal jelly.”
• Bees have five eyes. The two large ones you normally see and then three smaller eyes on the top of it’s head.
• You can tell how “full” a worker bee is by the width of their stripes. Since their abdomen expands to carry what they need back to their hive.
• Bees can give one another accurate directions through what is called the “waggle dance” – basically showing other bees the angle at which to travel and how far something is from the hive. Wikipedia explains it much better than I can.