How many flowers must honey bees visit to make one pound of honey?

How to get close to this number

Work from the other end of the chain. The explanation gives you the key: a single worker bee produces a tiny fraction of a teaspoon in its entire life. If one bee's lifetime output is that small, then the number of flower visits behind a whole pound has to be enormous, because each visit yields a droplet of nectar and nectar is mostly water that then gets evaporated off.

What makes this hard to intuit is that honey is a concentrate. Bees gather nectar and then drive off most of its water, so the finished product represents several times its own weight in raw material. Any question about a concentrated food — honey, olive oil, maple syrup — needs that multiplication step, and leaving it out undershoots badly.

The distance figure in the explanation is the one that makes it physical: flight mileage equivalent to going round the Earth twice, for one pound. These are industry-body figures rather than independent measurements, and they rest on assumptions about nectar yield per flower that vary hugely by species and weather. Read it as a well-established illustration of scale rather than a precise count.