Phu Quoc Bee Farms

Honey is made by transforming nectar through a process of regurgitation and evaporation. Bees store the honey inside their beehive and it is used as a source of food. There are many types, colors and flavors of honey, depending upon the origins of its nectar and the environment.  The honeybees found on Phu Quoc make honey from the islands flowers.

In each beehive there is only 1 queen and the queen is the only bee that has full developed ovaries in order to lays eggs – up to 2000 eggs/day. The queen only mates once with several male bees and has a life span of up to 5 years. Fertilized eggs become female (worker bees) and unfertilized eggs become male (drone bees). When the queen bee dies or reaches maturity where she can no longer produce eggs, the other bees in the colony will “make” a new queen by selecting a young larva and feeding it a diet of “royal jelly”. For queen bees, it takes 16 days from egg to emergence.

All worker bees are female as they do not have the ability to reproduce. Worker bees literally work themselves to death (hence the term “busy as a bee”) and live for only 4 to 9 months during the winter season, but only 6 weeks during the busy summer months. Nearly all of the bees in a hive are worker bees. A hive consists of 20,000 – 30,000 bees in the winter, and over 60,000 – 80,000 bees in the summer. The worker bee has a barbed stinger that results in her death following stinging, therefore, she can only sting once.

The male bee, or “drone bee”, are kept on standby during the summer for mating with a virgin queen. Because the male bee has a barbed sex organ, mating is followed by death of the male bee. Usually there are only 300 to 3000 male bees in a hive, which is less than 10% of the overall bee population. The male bees do not have a stinger.

Bee Farms

The Phu Quoc Bee Farms are relatively small places and visitors only need to spend less than 45 minutes in order to experience what this attraction has to offer.