Politics

The buzzword

Einstein predicted that if bees became extinct humans would follow four years later. Clue yourself up about Germany's bees with these key facts.

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Photo by Erik Hooymans (Wikimedia Commons)

The buzz about bees in Germany…

A bee colony has around 30,000 bees and one queen.

A queen bee can live for four years.


A worker bee produces about five grams of honey in her lifetime. to make one kilogram, the bees in a hive travel around 177,000km.


Each German eats an average of 1.1kg of honey per year, the highest per head consumption in the world.


Germany has 547 types of bees.


There are 90,000 beekeepers in Germany. Berlin is home to around 500.


99 percent of these are hobby beekeepers. Only one percent are professionals.


In the last 15 years, the number of bee colonies in Germany has declined from 1 million to 700,000.


According to the Institut für Bienenkunde in Celle, 1 million bees died because of the Varroa mite in the winter of 2011.


In 2011 the UNEP released a report stating we were facing a “pollinator crisis”.