Queen
The only fertile female. She mates once, early in life, with 10–20 drones and stores the sperm for years.
- Length
- ~20 mm
- Lifespan
- 2–5 years
- Egg to adult
- 16 days
- Output
- Up to ~1,500 eggs a day in peak season
A field guide to bees & honey
Twelve bees, one teaspoon.
A worker honey bee makes about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life. Learn how the colony pulls it off, where beekeeping began, and how a spring acacia tastes next to an autumn chestnut.
- 20,000+
- known bee species
- ~2 million
- flower visits per pound of honey
- 21 days
- from egg to worker
- 35 °C
- brood nest temperature
Inside this site
Pick a cell
The colony
Queen, workers and drones, the five jobs of a worker's life, and an interactive waggle dance.
→Honey
From nectar to capped cell, the Pfund colour scale, ten varietals and what else the hive makes.
→History
Eight thousand years of people and bees, from a cave wall in Valencia to World Bee Day.
→The honey shelf
Jars of honey, cut comb, beeswax candles and hive adoptions.
→Join the hive
Sign up for seasonal hive notes, recipes and apiary open days.
→
Spoon maths
What's in your spoon?
Slide to the amount of honey you stir into tea, bread or porridge. Each hexagon on the right is one worker's lifetime of honey.
Estimates from widely cited figures: 1/12 teaspoon per worker, about 2 million flower visits and 88,000 km of flight per pound (454 g), and 7 g per teaspoon.
3
36bee lifetimes
92,500flower visits
4,100 kmflown in total
Seasonal note
October in the apiary
In the northern hemisphere the colony is shrinking and sealing itself in for winter.
- The last forage
Ivy in flower
Ivy blooms from September into November and is often the last big nectar and pollen flow of the year. Ivy honey sets hard in the comb within weeks.
- The colony
Drones go out
Workers stop feeding the males and push them out of the hive. Winter bees take over: they live four to six months instead of six weeks.
- The beekeeper
Check the stores
A colony in a temperate climate needs roughly 15–20 kg of honey to last until spring. Mouse guards go on the entrance now.
The colony
Sixty thousand bodies, one animal
A summer honey bee colony holds 20,000 to 60,000 bees. Almost all of them are sterile female workers. Together they behave so much like a single organism that biologists call the colony a superorganism.
Three castes
Queen, worker, drone
Drawn to scale by typical body length.
Worker
Female, sterile, and responsible for everything else: nursing, building, guarding and foraging.
- Length
- ~13 mm
- Lifespan
- 5–6 weeks in summer, 4–6 months in winter
- Egg to adult
- 21 days
- Output
- ~1/12 teaspoon of honey in a lifetime
Drone
The males. No stinger, no pollen baskets. They exist to mate with queens from other colonies.
- Length
- ~16 mm
- Lifespan
- Spring to autumn
- Egg to adult
- 24 days
- Output
- Evicted by workers in autumn
Development
Egg, larva, pupa
Days spent in each stage. Royal jelly for the whole larval stage is what makes a queen, and it makes her the fastest to develop.
A worker's career
Five jobs in six weeks
Workers change roles as their glands mature. Ages are typical summer days after emerging from the cell, and colonies shift them when they need to.
Waggle dance
Directions, danced on the comb
On the vertical comb inside the dark hive, "straight up" stands for the sun's direction. The angle of the waggle run tells the others which way to fly, and its length tells them how far. Karl von Frisch decoded it and shared a Nobel Prize for it in 1973.
What the dancers read
Fly 40° right of the sun for about 1.2 km.
Waggle run ≈ 1.2 s, repeated with alternating return loops.
The timing is a rule of thumb: about one second of waggling per kilometre. Below roughly 50–100 m, foragers do a round dance that carries no direction.
Field figures
Bee by the numbers
~230/swingbeats, which make the buzz
5eyes: two compound eyes and three ocelli
~25 km/hcruising flight speed
3 kmtypical foraging radius, sometimes far more
~40 mgnectar in a full honey stomach
UVbees see ultraviolet, but not red
4 pairsof wax glands under a worker's abdomen
~12species of honey bee, out of 20,000+ bees
Honey
Nectar, minus most of the water
Honey is flower nectar that bees have concentrated, enzymed and sealed in wax. The flower decides the colour and flavour; the bees decide the chemistry.
The process
From flower to capped cell
Forage
A forager sips nectar through her tongue into her honey stomach, visiting hundreds of flowers per trip.
Add enzymes
Invertase from her glands starts splitting sucrose into glucose and fructose while she flies home.
Hand over
House bees take the nectar mouth to mouth, a transfer called trophallaxis, and add more enzymes.
Evaporate
Nectar is spread thin in cells while bees fan their wings to drive the water off.
Cap
When water drops to about 17–18%, workers seal the cell with a lid of fresh wax.
Water content
Nectar
60–80%
Honey
~17%
At this concentration few microbes can grow, which is why sealed honey keeps for decades.
Colour grading
The Pfund scale
Honey colour is graded in millimetres on a Pfund grader, which compares a wedge of honey against an amber glass standard. Lighter honeys tend to taste milder.
| Varietal | Typical Pfund | Class | Flavour | Crystallizes |
|---|
Typical readings. Every harvest differs with weather, soil and whatever else was in bloom.
Beyond honey
What else the hive makes
Beeswax
Workers around 12–17 days old secrete it as flakes from glands on their abdomen. Bees eat several kilograms of honey to make one kilogram of wax.
Propolis
"Bee glue": tree resins mixed with wax. Bees use it to seal cracks and coat the inside of the hive, and it has antimicrobial properties.
Royal jelly
A protein-rich secretion from nurse bees' head glands. Every larva gets it for about three days; a future queen gets it for her whole development.
Bee bread
Pollen packed into cells with nectar and left to ferment. It is the colony's main protein source and feeds the nurse bees.
In the kitchen
Keeping honey well
It set solid. Is it off?
No. Crystallizing is natural and happens faster in glucose-rich honey like rapeseed. Stand the jar in warm water around 40 °C to make it runny again.
Where to store it
At room temperature, lid on tight. Honey pulls moisture from the air, and wet honey can ferment. Cool spots around 10–15 °C speed up crystallizing.
Not for babies under 12 months
Honey can carry spores of Clostridium botulinum, which an infant's gut can't yet handle. This applies to raw and pasteurized honey and to baked goods made with it.
History
Eight thousand years of sweetness
People robbed wild nests long before anyone kept bees. The story runs from cliff faces to clay cylinders, straw skeps and the wooden box most beekeepers still use.
- c. 8,000 years agoCuevas de la Araña, Valencia, Spain
A honey hunter on a cave wall
A rock painting shows a figure climbing ropes or vines to a wild nest, holding a basket, with bees flying around. It is one of the oldest known images of honey gathering.
- c. 5,500 years agoBorjomi, Georgia
The oldest honey ever found
Archaeologists found traces of honey in ceramic jars placed in a tomb, apparently left for the afterlife journey.
- c. 2400 BCEAbu Ghurob, Egypt
Beekeeping carved in stone
Reliefs in the sun temple of King Nyuserre show workers blowing smoke into horizontal hives and pouring honey into jars. Egyptians kept bees in stacked pipes of mud and clay.
- c. 900 BCETel Rehov, Jordan Valley
The first apiary we can dig up
Rows of unfired clay cylinder hives, some still holding wax and bee remains. Researchers estimate the site held around a hundred hives or more.
- 4th c. BCEGreece
Aristotle watches the hive
His History of Animals describes bee behaviour in detail, though he assumed the colony's leader was a king.
- 29 BCERome
Virgil's beekeeping poem
Book IV of the Georgics is a practical and poetic guide to keeping bees, from siting hives to handling swarms.
- Middle AgesEurope
Skeps, monks and mead
Woven straw skeps spread across Europe. Monasteries kept bees for church candles of beeswax and brewed honey into mead. Harvesting often meant destroying the colony.
- 1609England
The king is a queen
Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie argued that the colony's leader is female. Jan Swammerdam later confirmed it by dissection.
- 1622Virginia colony
Honey bees reach North America
European honey bees arrived with colonists. Before then the Americas had many native bees, but no honey bees.
- 1851Philadelphia, USA
Bee space and the movable frame
Lorenzo Langstroth noticed bees leave a gap of about 6–9 mm untouched. Hanging frames with exactly that spacing meant combs could be lifted out without killing the colony. He patented the hive in 1852.
- 1865Italy
The centrifugal extractor
Franz von Hruschka spun honey out of uncapped combs, so the empty comb could go back to the bees to refill.
- 1973Stockholm
A Nobel for the dance
Karl von Frisch shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work including decoding the waggle dance.
- 2006United States
Colony collapse disorder
Beekeepers reported hives emptying almost overnight, and the problem got a name. Research since points to a mix of causes: varroa mites and the viruses they spread, pesticides and poor nutrition.
- 2018Worldwide
The first World Bee Day
The United Nations set 20 May, the birthday of Slovenian beekeeping pioneer Anton Janša, as a day to highlight pollinators.
About a third of the food we eat depends to some degree on animal pollination.
Honey bees get most of the attention, but most pollination is done by wild bees, flies, moths and beetles. Bumblebees buzz tomatoes into releasing pollen; mason bees work fruit blossom in cold spring weather when honey bees stay home. Planting a mix of flowers that bloom from early spring to late autumn helps all of them.
Get seasonal planting notes
The honey shelf
From our hives to your toast
Single-flower and wildflower honeys, comb sections and beeswax, all priced in euros.
Membership
Join the hive
Get a short note from the apiary each season: what's in bloom, what the bees are doing and what to plant.
Seasonal hive notes
Four letters a year, timed to the beekeeping calendar.
First taste of new harvests
Members hear about small-batch honeys before they go on the shelf.
Apiary open days
Suit up and open a hive with a beekeeper, May to September.
Contact
Talk to the beekeepers
Questions about honey, wholesale orders, hive adoptions, or a swarm hanging off your fence. We usually reply within two working days.
The apiary
Strada dei Favi 7
Località Fiorbianco
Open days: Saturdays, May–September
Shop hours
Tuesday–Saturday, 9:00–17:00
Email
hello@combandcell.exampleSwarm line, April–July
+39 000 000 0000Keep pets and children away from the cluster and don't spray it. Swarming bees are usually calm.
Thanks for writing
Before you write
Common questions
There's a swarm of bees in my garden. What should I do?
Stay calm and keep your distance. A swarm is a colony looking for a new home and the bees are full of honey and rarely sting. Don't spray or disturb them. Call a local beekeeping association or swarm collector; many will collect for free.
Why has my honey gone solid?
All real honey crystallizes eventually; it's the glucose forming crystals. Stand the jar in warm water (about 40 °C) and stir until it's runny. Avoid the microwave, which overheats it.
Is raw honey safe for babies?
No honey of any kind should be given to babies under 12 months, because of the risk of infant botulism.
What does adopting a hive mean?
You sponsor one colony for a year. You get photos and notes from inspections, a jar from your hive's harvest, and an invitation to an open day to meet them.
Can I visit the apiary?
Yes, on open days. We provide suits and veils. Wear long trousers and closed shoes, and skip perfume.