Beekeeping
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50 free Beekeeping trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Beekeeping looks simple from the outside: a box, some bees, a jar at the end of summer. Anyone who has kept a colony through a full year knows better. The craft runs on close observation of an insect society, a toolkit refined over centuries, and a constant contest with pests, weather and the bees' own urge to swarm. This quiz is pitched at people who already know their way around a hive. It covers equipment and hive designs, how queens are raised, mated and replaced, the pests and diseases every keeper has to watch for, and the chemistry that separates one honey from another. It also looks at the inventors, monks and writers who shaped modern beekeeping, and at the customs and stories that have grown up around the hive. The opening questions suit a curious beginner, and the later ones are written to test experienced keepers and anyone studying for a beekeeping exam. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something you can use in the apiary.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A honey bee's sting releases isoamyl acetate as an alarm signal, a chemical that smells of which fruit?
Bananas
Bananas get their sweet smell from isoamyl acetate, which is sold as banana oil. A stinging bee leaves the same chemical behind as a beacon that draws nestmates to sting the same spot.
Q 02Which California crop brings in over a million beehives each February, the largest managed pollination on Earth?
Almonds
Almonds depend so heavily on honey bees that migratory beekeepers truck hives from across the United States to California's orchards for the bloom.
Q 03Which beehive invented by Stuart and Cedar Anderson raised over $12 million in crowdfunding by promising honey on tap?
Flow Hive
Flow Hive frames hold plastic cells that split apart, so the honey drains out without anyone opening the box. The father-and-son campaign drew nearly 25,000 orders from more than 130 countries.
Q 04Which large moth squeaks when alarmed and mimics the scent of bees so it can raid hives for honey?
Death's-head hawkmoth
Death's-head hawkmoth adults carry a skull-shaped mark on the thorax and walk through hives unchallenged. The insect also appears in the film The Silence of the Lambs.
Q 05Which Virginian president recorded that Native Americans called the honey bee "the white man's fly"?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson pointed out that the honey bee was not native to North America, and that tribes read its arrival as a sign that settlers were not far behind.
Q 06After Elizabeth II died, the Royal Beekeeper performed which old custom at the Buckingham Palace hives?
Telling the bees
Telling the bees means informing the hives of deaths, births and marriages in the keeper's household. Folklore warned that a colony left uninformed might stop making honey or fly away.
Q 07Smoke from a beekeeper's smoker triggers which response in a colony, thought to prepare it to flee a fire?
Gorging on honey
Gorging on honey readies a colony to abandon a burning nest with its stores on board. Smoke also masks the alarm pheromones that guard bees give off.
Q 08Where does a young honey bee queen mate with a dozen or more drones before starting to lay eggs?
In midair
In midair is the only place a queen mates. She flies to a spot where drones gather and may go back for several days running until she has all the sperm she needs.
Q 09Which syndrome, first reported in the US in 2006, sees worker bees vanish and leave a queen, food and brood behind?
Colony collapse disorder
Colony collapse disorder was nicknamed Mary Celeste syndrome in Britain, after the ghost ship found abandoned at sea. Affected beekeepers reported losing 30 to 90 percent of their hives.
Q 10Which nocturnal mammal scratches at a hive entrance and eats the guard bees that come out to investigate?
Skunk
Skunk fur is thick enough to shrug off stings, which makes the animal one of the honey bee's main predators.
Q 11Which gap of 6 to 9 mm, which bees neither fill with comb nor seal with propolis, makes movable frames possible?
Bee space
Bee space was applied by L. L. Langstroth in 1851 to frames that hang clear of the hive walls, so every comb could be lifted out without cutting it free.
Q 12A honey extractor, invented by Franz Hruschka in 1865, relies on what to empty combs without destroying them?
Centrifugal force
Centrifugal force flings the honey out while the wax comb stays intact in its frame, so the bees can refill it. Hruschka's older method had been to crush the comb.
Q 13Which hive grid has gaps of about 4 mm, wide enough for workers to pass but too narrow for drones?
Queen excluder
Q 21Which country gives its name to ligustica, likely the most commercially distributed of all honey bee subspecies?
Italy
Italy south of the Alps is where this yellow-banded bee sat out the last ice age. It adapts to most climates but does less well in the humid tropics.
Q 22Which Benedictine monk in Devon bred a famous hybrid honey bee after an epidemic wiped out most of his abbey's colonies?
Brother Adam
Brother Adam was sent from Germany to Buckfast Abbey at the age of 11, and later traveled to Turkey in search of resistant bees to breed from.
Q 23Which brood disease reduces dead larvae to a ropy mass and is often controlled only by burning the infected colony?
American foulbrood
Queen excluder bars sit about 4.2 mm apart, so the queen cannot climb up to lay eggs in the combs where honey is stored.
Q 14What do beekeepers call the wax sheet fitted into a frame for bees to build their honeycomb on?
Foundation
Foundation was invented by the German Johannes Mehring in 1857, five years after the Langstroth hive was patented, and it is counted among the most important inventions in modern beekeeping.
Q 15L. L. Langstroth, the Yale graduate called the father of American beekeeping, worked in which profession?
Clergyman
Clergyman Langstroth was pastor of Congregational churches in Massachusetts before bees made his name. His hive, patented in 1852, is the basis of the standard design in much of the world.
Q 16Which country's beekeepers first detected Varroa destructor as late as 2022, near the port of Newcastle?
Australia
Australia answered by destroying hives inside eradication zones, including colonies at a bee research station. Investigators later suspected the mite had arrived before it was spotted.
Q 17Beekeepers shake a sample of bees in a jar with which kitchen ingredient to knock off and count varroa mites?
Powdered sugar
Powdered sugar dislodges the mites without killing the bees, which can go back to the hive afterward. An alcohol wash shakes off more mites but is lethal to the sample.
Q 18Which antiseptic chemical, familiar from first-aid kits, forms in honey through an enzyme that bees add to nectar?
Hydrogen peroxide
Hydrogen peroxide is a byproduct of an enzyme the bees mix into nectar. Together with the acidity the same reaction creates, it helps to suppress bacterial growth in the finished honey.
Q 19A finished queen cell hanging from honeycomb is commonly compared in shape and texture to which shelled nut?
Peanut
Peanut is the standard comparison for a queen cell, which points downward instead of lying flat like the other cells. Cells hung from the bottom of a frame are a sign of swarm preparations.
Q 20Where in the United States was beekeeping illegal until 2010, although residents kept rooftop hives anyway?
New York City
New York City lifted its ban in 2010 but required hives to be registered. Two years later only about half of the 400 colonies thought to be on its rooftops had been reported.
American foulbrood spreads as spores that larvae swallow with their food in their first three days. Each dead larva then gives rise to millions more spores.
Q 24Which acid found in rhubarb leaves is among the naturally occurring compounds beekeepers use to kill varroa mites?
Oxalic
Oxalic acid makes up about 0.5 percent of a rhubarb leaf. It is one of the natural mite treatments, along with thymol and the beta acids in hops resin.
Q 25Which instrument do beekeepers use to check that honey's water content is low enough to keep it from fermenting?
Refractometer
Refractometer readings rest on how far the honey bends light, which depends on how much is dissolved in it. Beekeepers use the reading to judge whether a batch is dry enough to keep.
Q 26Which sugar is so abundant in honey from brassica crops that it crystallizes almost immediately after harvest?
Glucose
Glucose comes out of solution as solid crystals, so the more of it a honey holds, the faster it sets. Honeys that are low in it, such as chestnut, stay liquid.
Q 27Honey supplies a colony's carbohydrates, but pollen is the hive's primary source of which nutrient?
Protein
Protein from stored pollen, called bee bread, is what nurse bees turn into food for the larvae, so a colony short of pollen has to cut back on brood.
Q 28What is the name for workers replacing an old, diseased or failing queen with a new one they raise themselves?
Supersedure
Supersedure begins when an aging queen's pheromone output fades. The replacement is generally raised in a cell built out from the face of a comb, not hung from its lower edge.
Q 29Which bees leave a clustered swarm to search for cavities, then report candidate nest sites back with dances?
Scouts
Scouts dance more excitedly for a better cavity, and the swarm commits once enough of them have gathered at a single site.
Q 30Which traditional hive, a basket of coiled straw set open-end-down, cannot be opened to inspect the combs for disease?
Skep
Skep baskets have housed bees for some 2,000 years, but taking the honey was difficult and often destroyed the entire colony.