Nature’s Delight: Honey Bee – 1 oz. Fine Silver Coin

Discover the buzz! Explore the beauty and significance of this hexagon-shaped coin. Order today!

Flying from flower to flower, the honey bee collects pollen, floral oils, and the nectar that is turned into honey at the hive; as it moves about, it provides an essential pollination service that helps plants grow and reproduce, ultimately contributing to one-third of the foods we eat.

Known to be efficient both in instinct and design, the honeybee and its comb are beautifully adorned with yellow gold plating on this 99.99% pure silver coin, which, fittingly, features the popular hexagon coin shape that mimics the natural design of a honeycomb cell, widely considered to be nature’s perfect structure.

A honeycomb-shaped showcase! Order today!

SPECIAL FEATURES

• BEEautiful design. Venerated for its industrious nature, the honey bee takes centre stage on this hexagonal coin’s reverse, where the layered design artfully connects the pollinator with its pollen source and its honeycomb.
• Hexagon coin. The six-sided coin shape from our Snowflake series generated a lot of buzz; here, the hexagonal outline resembles the shape of a honeycomb cell, where nectar and pollen are stored inside the beehive.
• Selective gold plating. On your coin’s reverse, the honey bee and the honeycomb background are plated with yellow gold, its amber honey hue contrasting beautifully with the silvery flower petals.
• A winged wonder. Honey bees are among the world’s top pollinators, and they are a crucial part of the biodiversity on which we all depend for our survival.
• Pure silver. Your coin is crafted in 1 oz. of 99.99% pure silver.
• Limited mintage. Just 7,500 coins are available to collectors worldwide.
• Includes serialized certificate. The Royal Canadian Mint certifies all of its collector coins.
• No GST/HST

DESIGN

Inspired by daisies and black-eyed Susans, the centre of a stylized flower serves as a landing pad for a busy honey bee (Apis mellifera) in this reverse design by Canadian artist June Steube. The bee’s central position reflects its importance as a pollinator, while the overhead view allows for a more stylized representation of its wing pattern. The honeycomb in the background is visible between the flower petals, its hexagonal cells mirroring the coin’s six-sided shape. Both the bee and the honeycomb, as well as the rim on both sides, are plated with yellow gold. The obverse features the gold-plated effigy of His Majesty King Charles III by Canadian artist Steven Rosati.

DID YOU KNOW?

Honey bees have five eyes and six legs, and can fly at a speed of 24 km/h. That buzzing sound you hear when a honeybee comes near? That’s the sound of its wings beating up to 240 times per second!

Depending on the time of year, one hive can contain up to 80,000 individuals – mostly female workers/foragers, a few hundred male workers, and one queen. Making honey requires team work: it takes nectar sourced from about 2 million flowers to make just one pound of honey (a beehive can yield between 10 and 100 pounds of honey in a year), and each forager only produces about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her short lifetime.

Each hexagonal honeycomb cell serves as both a storehouse and a nest for larvae, and it isn’t just the honey bee that builds nests with hexagonal cells—wasps do it, too. The shape, which has inspired architects and engineers, provides several advantages, such as excellent strength-to-weight ratio, thermal insulation, space efficiency and structural stability, while minimizing the amount of building material (beeswax) required.

PACKAGING

Your coin is encapsulated and presented in a Royal Canadian Mint-branded black paperboard case.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

The Artist: 

Inspired by nature’s creative genius, my vision for this coin design was a stylized interpretation of the exquisite relationship between the shapes of the bee, the flower and the honeycomb. The bee is central to this vision, with the reflective symmetry of its wings emphasizing a classical order and harmony. The Fibonacci spiral of the flower pistil along with the honeycomb hexagons highlight the complexity and beauty existing in the natural world.  – June Steube, Artist

The Engraver: 

Due to the specialized nature of hexagon shaped coins, we had rigid manufacturing restrictions and the relief height was at a premium. With so many prominent elements stacked on top of one another – the bee, the flower, the hexagon pattern – we had to really optimize things to make them stand out without losing any of their details or form in the process. We decided to cut this design with the laser, which allowed us to achieve much finer and more delicate details.

Many parts of the design go down almost as far as the zero plain (the field), creating space for other connected elements that may otherwise have been lost in the modeling process. For example, with the centre of the flower, the relief was lowered down to nearly zero percent where it meets the bee, so that we could give extra roundness and form to the pollinator, making full use of the range within the allotted relief height. – Ryan Poser, Engraver-3D Artist