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🦁 Animal world 🐞 Insects and minibeasts

Bee

Bee

📖 In short

Buzz… buzz! Who's this busy insect flying from flower to flower? It's the bee! Bees are small insects but very important to us: they make sweet honey and wax, and help flowers turn into the tasty fruit we eat.

🤩 Did you know?

  • A bee has 5 eyes: two big ones and 3 small ones on top of its head!
  • A bee flaps its wings about 200 times a second, which makes the buzzing sound.
  • The wax cells in a hive have six sides, a shape that saves space and wax.
  • One bee makes only a tiny amount of honey in its whole life, less than a teaspoon!

🔎 Find out more

🌟 The kingdom of the hive

Honeybees live in a home called a “hive”, with thousands of bees. Each hive has one queen who lays the eggs, many hard-working workers, and a few males.

🔍 The bee dance

When a worker bee finds a field full of flowers, she goes back to the hive and does a special dance! The dance tells her sisters which way the flowers are and how far.

💡 How is honey made?

A bee sips sweet nectar from flowers and carries it to the hive, where bit by bit it turns into delicious honey, stored in six-sided wax cells.

🎯 Friend of the flowers

As a bee moves between flowers it carries pollen, helping plants make fruit and seeds. So thank you, bee, for apples and oranges!

📸 More pictures

Bee
Bee
Bee

🧩 Test yourself

1 How many eyes does a bee have?

2 How does a bee tell her sisters where the flowers are?

3 What shape are the wax cells in a hive?

4 Which picture shows “Bee”?

🦁 Discover more

📷 Picture sources: Wikimedia Commons