How many flowers a honeybee must visit to make 1 kilogram of honey?

There are some 22,000 species of bees. Some, like leaf-cutter bees, are the solitary kind. For the most part, however, honeybees live in vast colonies. A honeybee colony has a queen, tens of thousands of female worker bees, and a few hundred male drones.

It’s the job of worker bees to collect nectar from various flowers. Along with collecting the nectar they find, bees are also useful for spreading the pollen of flowers and other plants, helping them develop and grow.

The nectar is then taken back to the beehive and processed into honey over time. If you’re wondering how many flowers it takes to make about a kilogram or around 2.2 pounds of honey, let’s do the math. Each worker bee makes about ten trips, visiting around a thousand flowers on each one of them. This means that one worker bee would visit seven to ten thousand flowers in a day. Some might also ask if bees really hum as they fly, so check out the answer here.

According to some sources, it would take about 65,000 trips to 65 million flowers to make 1 kilogram of honey – a marathon task indeed. Still, this number might be more or less according to the kind of variables in any specific situation.

Bees on a honeycomb

One variable in question here is the amount of nectar that the flowers contain. Some species might have more than others, so it really depends on what kind of flowers are closest to the beehive and are visited by the bees most frequently.

Another variable depends upon the species of honeybee. Some species might gather more nectar and make more trips than other kinds, so they’d be making a kilo of honey much more quickly.

Several other factors can contribute to the answer about how many flowers it takes to make a kilo of honey; the weather, the size of the hive, etc.

With the illustrations and etchings, you’d learn how to make candles, beauty products, furniture polish, and several delicious dishes with your organic backyard honey. If nothing else, this work is perfect for making plans and dreaming about having your own bee colony one day.