A bee colony has tens of thousands of bees, most of them worker bees, who are busy every day looking for food to feed their large families.
During the gathering season, each day the colony sends out a varying number of scout bees to search for honey sources, and these prospecting bees will conduct a detailed investigation of the flowering of plants around the nest.
Usually the area covered by a bee colony is about 100 square kilometers to 400 square kilometers. This is based on the flight distance of the bees, a full-fed bee can fly about 10 kilometers, but in fact they can not always fly in a straight line, and the road will encounter various conditions, so the coverage area is smaller than the theoretical 400 square kilometers, but basically greater than 100 square kilometers.
In general, bees do not do extreme long-distance flights, which is more than worth the loss for their collection efficiency, and most of them do not leave the nest for 4 kilometers. Unless there is a shortage of honey sources around them, they will be forced to fly to distant honey sources to collect honey.
In the bee colony, the scout bees account for about one-tenth of the total number of bees, and they collect the opening of flowers in the area every day, and grasp the changes that occur at any time, so that the worker bees can make the most efficient work arrangements.
When scout bees get the exact location of the resource, they dance to tell the surrounding worker bees. Most of the time, there are many bees in the hive who can't see this dance. After the biologists have found that in fact, when the bees are dancing, they will also emit an ultrasound, and the distant bees receive this ultrasonic signal through their antennae, thus knowing the specific situation of the honey source.
So a large number of worker bees began to fly to the source of honey, and when they reached their destination, they began to collect pollen and nectar. These bees have a clear task arrangement, the pollen collectors will collect pollen, the honey collectors will only collect honey, and only a small number of bees will collect pollen and nectar at the same time.
Because each flower does not contain much pollen and nectar, an average of 3,000 flowers are picked by a bee every day. Not all of these bees are so industrious, relatively speaking, some may collect 10 times a day, and some will only collect 3-5 times, but most of the bees will work hard.
At the end of a busy day, scouting bees and worker bees will return to the hive to rest, and some bees will have no time to go back before it is dark, and they can only find a place to rest outside.
In the whole hive, the hardest work is these out-of-town working bees, they need more rest than other bees in order to nourish the spirit to continue working the next day.
A bee can only work 10-20 days in a lifetime, during which it can collect up to 8 grams of nectar, according to a conversion rate of 50%, each bee can produce up to 4 grams of honey in a lifetime. For this 4 grams of honey, it needs to fly thousands of kilometers, stopping at more than 50,000 flowers.