This morning, my lavender is buzzing with bees. Social bees – honey bees and bumblebees – need to visit a lot of flowers to get enough pollen for the rest of their colony. A single nest of bumblebees can hold 200 – 500 inhabitants, while a honeybee hive could have anywhere from 10,000 to over 60,000 bees inside!
Pollen is collected as food for the baby bees; it is a great source of protein for a growing bee. A honeybee hive on average will collect about 30kg of pollen each year. While gathering this pollen, the foraging bees also feed on nectar, and this nectar will eventually become honey. It takes a lot of work and a lot of trips for a honey bee to make honey: a single honeybee will produce 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her short lifetime.
I guess that’s why we call them busy bees!
