Bees
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7correct to beat the crowd
This honey bee trivia quiz has 92 free questions with answers and covers the whole life of the hive: how a queen can lay more than her own body weight in eggs each day, why drones die the moment they mate, what the barbs on a worker's stinger are really for, and how a foraging bee tells her sisters where the flowers are with a dance that won Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize. There are questions on honey and beeswax too - how bees dry nectar down to 18% water, why honey never spoils, how many wax scales go into a gram - plus the history of beekeeping from Spanish cave paintings to Langstroth's movable frames, the accidental release of Africanized 'killer bees' in Brazil, and the first report of colony collapse disorder. Solitary bees and bumblebees get a look-in as well. It suits kids who love bugs, gardeners, new beekeepers and pub-quiz teams. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 92 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many eyes do honey bees possess?
Five
Five: two large compound eyes build the picture, while three tiny simple eyes on top of the head register light levels and are thought to help the bee hold steady in flight.
Q 02Which resinous bee product seals cracks and protects the hive from pathogens?
Propolis
Propolis, or 'bee glue', is plant resin worked with wax and saliva; bees also use it to seal up intruders too big to drag out, such as a dead mouse, so the body cannot rot inside the hive.
Q 03Roughly how long can a queen honey bee live?
A few years
A few years: three or four is common for a queen, yet many beekeepers replace her after only a year or two, before she starts to slow down.
Q 04Which color can bees see that is invisible to humans?
Ultraviolet
Ultraviolet sits at one end of a bee's colour range, which runs through blue to green and stops short of red; petal patterns invisible to us point bees to the centre of the flower.
Q 05Which of these jobs in a honey bee colony is done by the queen rather than by the worker bees?
Laying fertilized eggs
Laying fertilized eggs is the queen's alone; a worker is genetically no different from her and may start laying if the colony loses its queen, but her eggs normally yield only drones.
Q 06Unlike honey bees, what is true of mason and leafcutter bees?
Every female is fertile and nests alone
Every female is fertile and nests alone: mason, leafcutter and carpenter bees have no queen or worker caste, and each female builds and provisions her own nest; most bee species live this way.
Q 07Which type of bee is unable to sting?
Drone bee
Drone bee: males have no stinger, because a bee's sting is a modified egg-laying organ that only the females, queens and workers alike, possess.
Q 08A beekeeper's smoke calms a hive partly by masking the signal that guard bees give off to do what?
Raise the alarm
Raise the alarm: guard bees give off a pheromone, smelling of bananas, that rallies nestmates to defend the hive; smoke masks it, and also sets the bees gorging on honey as if a fire were near.
Q 09Honey is primarily produced by bees from what substance collected from flowers?
Nectar
Honey bees collect nectar, a sugary liquid produced by flowers, and convert it into honey through a process of regurgitation, enzymatic breakdown, and water evaporation.
Q 10On which part of their body do worker honey bees carry pollen back to the hive?
Their hind legs
Their hind legs each carry a 'pollen basket', a smooth hollow fringed with hairs; the bee brushes pollen off her body, dampens it so it sticks, and packs it in for the flight home.
Q 11From which part of their body do worker bees secrete beeswax?
Glands on their abdomen
Glands on their abdomen: young workers secrete the wax as thin scales from glands on the underside of the abdomen, then chew and mould the scales into honeycomb.
Q 12Where do most species of solitary bees typically build their nests?
In tunnels in the ground or hollow stems
In tunnels in the ground or hollow stems: most solitary bees dig burrows in bare soil, which is why tilling can wipe them out, while the rest use hollow stems or beetle holes in dead wood.
Q 13A queen honey bee mates during which part of her life?
Q 21When a honey bee colony swarms, what is it doing?
Splitting in two to reproduce
Splitting in two to reproduce: the mother queen flies off with a large share of the workers to found a new nest, leaving the old one, with its comb and honey, to a daughter queen.
Q 22What happens to a drone honey bee immediately after it mates with a queen in flight?
It dies
It dies: the drone's endophallus tears away inside the queen and his body falls away; a drone grows from an unfertilised egg and so has a mother but no father.
Q 23Which unusual feature of the worker honey bee's stinger means it often stays behind in a mammal's skin?
It is barbed
Her first weeks
Her first weeks: she mates with many drones on a few early flights, then stores their sperm in a pouch called the spermatheca and draws on it for the rest of her life.
Q 14In autumn, what happens to most drones in a temperate honey bee colony?
They are driven out of the hive by workers
They are driven out of the hive by workers: with mating season over and winter stores to protect, workers stop feeding the drones and drag them outside, where they die.
Q 15In the busy summer season, a worker honey bee typically lives for about how long?
Six weeks
Six weeks is about all a summer worker gets, given the risks of daily foraging; workers raised in autumn can last several months, long enough to carry the colony through winter.
Q 16Which scientific name, Latin for 'honey-bearing bee', belongs to the western honey bee?
Apis mellifera
Apis mellifera takes its species name from the Latin for honey; an Old World native, it has been carried by beekeepers to every continent except Antarctica.
Q 17Which Austrian won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for decoding honey bee communication?
Karl von Frisch
Karl von Frisch also showed that when the sun is hidden, bees take their compass bearing from the pattern of polarised light in the sky, which human eyes cannot detect.
Q 18In the waggle dance, food lying directly toward the sun is signalled by a run in which direction on the comb?
Straight upward
Straight upward on the vertical comb stands for the sun's direction; a run angled 30 degrees right of vertical means food 30 degrees right of the sun, and long dancers shift the angle as the sun moves.
Q 19What does the duration of a bee's waggle run encode?
The distance to the food source
The distance to the food source is read from how long the waggle run lasts, the longer the farther; for food very close to the hive, the dancer switches to a simple round dance instead.
Q 20What is stored, fermented pollen packed into comb cells called?
Bee bread
Bee bread is pollen packed into cells with saliva and a little honey and left to ferment with lactic acid bacteria; it is the colony's protein store, eaten by workers and fed to larvae.
It is barbed: the barbs catch only in elastic skin like a mammal's, so a worker that stings another insect can usually pull her sting free and use it again.
Q 24Which US state's flag and seal carry a beehive, with the honey bee as its state insect?
Utah
The beehive was a Mormon symbol of industry long before Utah became a state.
Q 25'Killer bees' descend from an African subspecies that escaped quarantine in which country?
Brazil
Brazil: in 1957 African queens being bred by geneticist Warwick Kerr escaped from an experimental apiary near Rio Claro, Sao Paulo, and their hybrid descendants spread north to reach the United States by 1990.
Q 26How do Japanese honey bees kill an invading giant hornet?
They surround it and cook it with heat
They surround it and cook it with heat: hundreds of bees ball round the hornet and shiver their flight muscles until it is hotter than the hornet can survive, yet just within the bees' own limit.
Q 27Which nurse-bee secretion is fed to every honey bee larva, worker and drone alike, for its first three days?
Royal jelly
Royal jelly goes to every larva at first; after about three days workers and drones are weaned onto pollen and honey, while a larva kept on the jelly throughout grows into a queen.
Q 28How many wax-producing glands does a worker honey bee have?
Eight
Each scale is about 3 mm across, and roughly 1,100 of them are needed to make a single gram of wax.
Q 29Lorenzo Langstroth noticed in 1851 that bees leave a narrow gap clear, which let him design what?
Movable-frame hive
Movable-frame hive: bees plug narrower gaps and build comb across wider ones, so frames hung a 'bee space' apart can be lifted out and put back without tearing the nest apart.
Q 30Finished honey usually has a water content of around what percentage?
18%
About 18% water is all that ripe honey holds, because the bees evaporate the rest in the warm hive; kept that dry, honey has an indefinite shelf life.