A LITTLE CURIOSITY. A WHOLE WORLD OF BEES.
Buzz-ucation.
An interactive learning experience for all ages—explore the world of bees, flowers, and honey through hands-on activities.
Or explore the foraging map ↓Inside the hive
Open each hive layer to learn where bees raise young, store honey and enter the colony.
Step insideRead the waggle dance
Decode the direction, follow the clue, and find the flowers.
Step insideNectar to honey
See how bees collect nectar, remove water and store finished honey in wax cells.
Step insideBuild a bloom season
Choose Minnesota native flowers for spring, summer and fall to plan a longer season of food for pollinators.
Step insideWhy honey crystallizes
Why does honey turn grainy or firm? Compare liquid and crystallized honey, then learn how gentle warming makes it pour again.
Step insideSmall beginnings.
Different destinies.
Follow a queen, worker and drone from egg to adult. Move through the days, look inside the cell, and discover how food shapes a bee’s future.
Explore bee developmentKEEP FOLLOWING THE FLOWERS
How far does a bee’s world reach?
Explore the landscape around a hive, then discover the work behind each jar.
Illustrative hive centered on Alexandria. This is not our apiary or a pickup address.
FOLLOW THE FORAGE
A wider world of flowers.
About 12.6 square miles
This shows the area inside a circle, not a measured flight path or a guarantee of where our bees forage.
Honey bees routinely forage roughly 1–3 miles from the hive and can reach about 7.5 miles (12 km) when food is scarce nearby. Explore from the hive center out to that long-distance range; it is not a fixed daily route or a hard limit for every bee.
FROM FLOWER TO JAR
A small jar.
A remarkable amount of work.
Choose a size. Watch the patch bloom to reveal the collective work behind the honey.
Each illuminated flower represents about 50,000 flower visits.
Hex sampler · 6 oz honey
How do we estimate that?
This illustration scales the commonly cited estimates of about two million flower visits and 768 worker-bee lifetime contributions per pound of honey. Flower visits may include repeat visits to the same plants. These are educational estimates—not counts from our hives. Nectar yield, weather and colony conditions change the actual effort.