The Buzz About Bees

WORLD BEE DAY, celebrated in May, was chosen because it's also the birthday of the pioneer of modern beekeeping, Anton Janša of 18th-century Slovenia.

- Stephanie Gray

1. Bees are well worth celebrating: They pollinate 35 per cent of the world's food crops, including 75 per cent of the fruits, vegetables and nuts grown in the US And a single bee visits as many as 5,000 lowers a day—busy indeed!

2. THE BUZZING beings we call bees comprise 20,000 different species, only eight of which produce honey. And honey might lose some of its sweetness for you once you know what it is: nectar that honeybees have repeatedly regurgitated and dehydrated. It's not just people who stock up on the stuff: Bees subsist on honey during the winter when they can't forage.

3. DURING ITS ENTIRE lifetime, one bee will create only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. So that 12-ounce jar in the pantry equates to the life’s work of 864 bees. To produce 0.5 kg of honey, a bee colony needs to visit about 2 million flowers.

4. IT MAY sound like something out of The Lord of the Rings, but rare Elvish honey gets extracted not from a hive but from the walls of caves in northeastern Turkey. In Turkish, this elixir is called peri bali, which translates to ‘fairy honey’ or ‘elf honey’. Honey harvested from this region is said to be rich in minerals, and at more than $150 (*13,000) per ounce, it’s among the world’s most expensive.