Don’t Step on a Bee Day – July 10th

July 10^th is Don’t Step on a Bee Day. Celebrate this fun holiday by taking a moment to watch the bees busy at work in your garden.

Did you know bees use dance to communicate? Karl Ritter von Frisch was the scientist that cracked the honeybee’s communication code and won a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1973.

Once a bee discovers a food source, it returns to the hive. The dance tells fellow worker bees the quality as well as the location of the flowers. The bee calculates the shortest route to the flowers and shares this information with the other bees.

The bee shakes its body and dances in the direction of the newly discovered flowers. The number of vibrations and length of the dance tells the others the distance they will need to travel. This allows the bees to take just enough honey for the trip.

A honey bee will visit about 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.

A bit more information: The scientific name for honey bees is Apis mellifera. Apis means bee in Latin and mellifera is honey-carrying. The honeybees are the only insect that produces food for people.