A typical hive houses 3 types of bees. The queen is the biggest female, and the only one who gets to reproduce (that’s pretty much her only job). All the other females are just worker bees, the smallest of the honey bees. They’re the female… bees… that sting you and die. They work mostly in the hive, making honey and beeswax and taking care of the young. Welcome to colony life, I guess?

Bees don’t have collars (although, that could look adorable). The male bees are called drones (on the far right in the image).

If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva from the newly hatched baby insects and feeding it a special food called “royal jelly“. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.

Apparently two aren’t enough. Yes, bees have FIVE eyes! Two large compound eyes sit on the side of their head to detect shapes and colours in the immediate environment. But they also have three smaller eyes called simple eyes on the top of their head which handle orientation and navigation.

Honey bees have two sets of wings (four wings) that are attached to the thorax. The fore wings are much larger than the hind wings. They hook the two wings on the same side of their body together to form a larger pair when flying, and unhook them when not flying.

Yes, bees can get drunk on fermented nectar, causing them to fall off of flowers or fly into trees. Relatable? But if a bee comes back to the hive drunk, guard bees will actually block them from entering the hive until they sober up. So what do hives and nightclubs have in common? Drunk visitors and bouncers. Oh, a final note: bees can consume pure ethanol without dying. If you’re a human, you’d die. Don’t drink pure alcohol.

It’s called the waggle dance! And it refers figure-eight flight pattern bees use to communicate that they’ve found food. Scientists think that the direction they fly in indicates the direction of the food source in relation to the sun, and the duration of the dance indicates either distance to, or the quality of, the food source. If this sounds like fun to you, maybe the next time you want to invite a colleague to lunch, you could take the opportunity to get your waggle on.

Asian giant hornets are known to mercilessly massacre hives of much smaller honey bees. But Japanese honey bees have developed a survival strategy - they take advantage of the fact that they only die at 47.8°C, but hornets can’t survive temperatures higher than 47.2°C. So if a hornet enters their hive, they swarm it and start vibrating in unison to raise their body temperatures until they cook the hornet to death. I guess to borrow the words of Chef Gusteau from the Disney classic, Ratatouille, anyone can cook.

A vast majority of bees are vegetarian, but nature loves an exception. There are a small number of tropical bees in the genus Trigona, notably in Panama, that eat meat. They have earned the name "Vulture Bees" after being observed eating the decaying flesh of lizard, toad, bird, monkey, snake and fish carcasses, probably as a source of protein. So other than being stung (and maybe also having an allergic reaction), you now have another reason why you aren’t a wimp if you are absolutely terrified of bees. Well, this type of bee at least.

The term comes from the Old English “hony moone” - hony as in the tenderness and pleasure experienced by a newlywed couple, and moone indicating that that sweetness is fleeting (it takes a month for the moon to wane and wax). But there is a more literal connection: the 5th century Norse practice of consuming large quantities of mead (fermented honey) in the first month of marriage. Mead was believed to have aphrodisiac properties that could improve the likelihood of conception.