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How far do bees fly?
How far do bees fly during an average foraging trip?
It really depends. Bees fly at about 35 kilometres per hour, which is pretty quick for a tiny little insect. They're beating their wings about 240 cycles a second, and they're going for it! So they can be quite quick if the flowers are close, if you do the maths on the distance. But they can fly up to 10 kilometres if they're hungry, but generally they'll stay within a three-kilometre radius and they'll be bringing that back to the hive. So a foraging bee will usually do multiple trips to the flowers and back per day. And they could visit up to 2000 flowers. So if you've got a really strong colony with 50,000 bees and half of them go out to the flowers, and the flowers are a kilometre away, then you could get 50 million flowers pollinated in a day! Absolutely extraordinary pollinators. And that's why humans have dragged them all around the world, wherever they go, because they're such extreme pollinators. They can now pollinate very quickly, a whole massive almond orchard, and allowed that almond orchard to set fruit. So they’ve become an integral part of our food chain. And it's just amazing to think about the maths, because the amount of flight from just one hive, if you add up the amount of flight, it's actually several times around the world. Extraordinary!
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