Sometimes honey crystallises when it gets cold. It’s completely harmless, and just means glucose has separated from the rest of the sugars. You can dissolve the crystals by putting the honey jar in an airing cupboard or a basin of hot water until it becomes clear.

You should never feed honey to babies under a year old. That’s because their digestive tracts aren’t quite ready to process some of the naturally occurring constituents in honey. Wait until they’re one year old, and they’ll be ready to start loving honey.

When a worker bee has found a new source of nectar she returns to the hive and performs a dance called a waggledance which describes to the other bees the location of the new flowers

Worker bees have eight wax-producing mirror glands on the inner sides of the stemites (the ventral shield or plate of each segment of the body)

Bees carry pollen back to the hive in sacks on their legs.

A mated queen doesn't leave her hive unless she is forced out by a new queen. The worker bees will kill and replace a queen who is not laying sufficiently.

A honey bee will only sting if threatened and once it has stung once it dies (unlike wasps who are able to sting many times.)

Honey was found in the tomb of the Egyptian King Tutankhamen and as it doesn't degrade over time it should still be edible!

A typical Bee colony consists of 30,000 to 60,000 bees.

The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.

It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world

During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.

Queen bees will lay as many as 2000 eggs on a good day and an average of one every 45 seconds

Honey is 80% sugars and 20% water. Honey stored in air tight containers never spoils.

Honey bees from a typical hive visit approximately 225,000 flowers per day. Bees must visit approximately 2 million flowers and fly over 55,000 miles to make 1 pound of honey.

Beeswax production in most hives is only about 1.5% to 2.0% of the honey yield

Honey bees fly up to 15 mph and beat their wings 200 times per second or 12,000 beats per minute!

Honey bees have 5 eyes: 3 simple eyes on top of its head, and 2 compound eyes!

Bees are pollinators vital to our food chain. One third of the food we eat would not be available but for bees.

If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva  and feeding it a special food called 'royal jelly'

In 1984, bees constructed a honeycomb in zero gravity! It was part of a space shuttle experiment.

The style (flavour, aroma and colour) of every honey depends on the type of nectars the bees harvest.

The earliest illustration of honey being gathered is 15,000 years old. It’s in a cave painting in eastern Spain.