Bees
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7correct to beat the crowd
This honey bee trivia quiz has 44 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 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many eyes do honey bees possess?
Five
Honey bees have five eyes: two large compound eyes on the sides of their head for detecting movement and color, and three smaller simple eyes (ocelli) on top of their head that help with light detection and orientation.
Q 02Which resinous bee product seals cracks and protects the hive from pathogens?
Propolis
Propolis, also known as 'bee glue,' is made from plant resins mixed with beeswax and saliva. Bees use it to seal openings, smooth internal walls, and as an antimicrobial barrier against invaders and diseases.
Q 03What is the typical lifespan of a queen honey bee?
2 to 7 years
A queen typically lives 2 to 7 years; she mates only in her first weeks and rations that stored sperm for the rest of her life, and beekeepers often replace her after a year or two once laying declines.
Q 04Which color can bees see that is invisible to humans?
Ultraviolet
Bees see blue, green and ultraviolet where humans see red, green and blue; the ultraviolet patterns on flowers guide them to nectar and are invisible to us.
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 a queen and can even become a laying worker, but then produces only male 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 bees are male and do not possess a stinger. Only female bees, which include queen and worker bees (and bumblebee queens), are capable of stinging.
Q 08What is the purpose of the 'waggle dance' performed by honey bees?
To indicate the location of food sources
The waggle dance is a sophisticated form of communication used by foraging honey bees to inform other bees in the hive about the direction and distance to profitable food sources.
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
Worker honey bees have specialized structures called corbiculae, or 'pollen baskets,' on their hind legs, which they use to collect and carry pollen back to the hive.
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
The majority of solitary bee species are ground-nesting, digging tunnels in soil, while others are cavity-nesting, utilizing hollow plant stems, holes in wood, or other existing cavities.
Q 13On her mating flights, roughly how many males does a virgin queen honey bee mate with?
Q 21When a colony swarms, roughly what fraction of the adult workers leave with the old queen?
Two thirds
About two thirds of the workers, commonly 60-70%, leave with the old queen; the swarm departs once the daughter queen cells are capped, so the old colony is queenless only briefly.
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 he falls to the ground within minutes; 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
10-20
A queen mates with roughly 10-20 drones, often a dozen or more, over one or a few flights, then stores their sperm in her spermatheca to fertilise eggs for years.
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 15What is the average lifespan of a worker honey bee during the busy summer months?
2 to 6 weeks
Summer workers live only 2 to 6 weeks, worn out by foraging; the winter generation, born when there is little to do, can survive up to 20 weeks.
Q 16The western honey bee, the species most beekeepers keep and the most common of the honey bees, has what scientific name?
Apis mellifera
Apis mellifera, Latin for 'honey-bearing' bee, is the western honey bee; its relative Apis cerana, the eastern honey bee, is the other Apis species widely kept in hives across Asia.
Q 17Which Austrian won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for decoding honey bee communication?
Karl von Frisch
Karl von Frisch decoded the waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with fellow ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen.
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
For food closer than about ten metres, Italian honey bees switch to a simple round dance with no directional information.
Q 20What is stored, fermented pollen packed into comb cells called?
Bee bread
Bee bread is pollen packed into cells with nectar and saliva and left to ferment with lactic acid bacteria; it is the colony's protein store, eaten by workers and fed to larvae.
The barbs only catch in elastic skin, so a bee that stings another insect can usually pull free and sting again.
Q 24In which year were the first honey bee colonies shipped from England to Virginia?
1622
1622 is when the Virginia Company's ships landed the first hives at Jamestown; the bees spread slowly westward through the colonies and reached the Pacific coast only in the 1850s, carried by settlers.
Q 25Which 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 26'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 27How do some honey bees kill an invading hornet that is too big to sting?
They surround it and cook it with heat
They surround it and cook it with heat: Japanese honey bees form a 'hot defensive ball' around the hornet, raising it to about 46 °C, hotter than the hornet can survive but within the bees' own tolerance.
Q 28How long are worker and drone bee larvae fed royal jelly before being switched to other food?
Three days
Three days: all larvae get royal jelly at first, then worker and drone larvae are switched to a coarser diet of pollen and honey; the secretion comes from head glands of young nurse bees.
Q 29How 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 30Which American clergyman's 1853 book The Hive and the Honey-bee describes his 'bee space' movable-frame hive?
Lorenzo Langstroth
Lorenzo Langstroth, a Congregational minister, patented his movable-frame hive in 1852; the 'bee space' of 6 to 9 mm is a gap bees leave open rather than fill with wax, which lets frames lift out.