🐾 Honey Bee

Honey Bee

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Who it is

• Scientific name: Apis mellifera
• Family & relatives: A flying insect in the family Apidae, related to bumblebees and other bees, and more distantly to wasps and ants.
• How to spot it: A small fuzzy insect with golden-brown and black stripes, two pairs of clear wings, and pollen baskets on its back legs.

Its body & abilities

• Size: A worker bee is only about 1 to 1.5 cm long.
• Weight: Very light, only about a tenth of a gram, so it can float from flower to flower.
• Body & adaptations: It has a long tongue to sip nectar, fuzzy hairs that catch pollen, and a body split into head, thorax, and abdomen.
• Top speed: Flies at about 25 km/h (15 mph), beating its wings more than 200 times per second.
• Strength: For its tiny size it is a mighty worker, able to carry nectar and pollen almost equal to its own weight.
• Senses: It sees colors including ultraviolet that guide it to flowers, and it smells and tastes with its antennae.
• Growing up: It grows in four stages: egg, then larva, then pupa, then adult, changing shape completely inside a wax cell.

Where it lives

• Habitat: Lives in a hive, in hollow trees, rock crevices, or beekeepers' wooden boxes, always near flowers.
• Where in the world: Found almost worldwide, kept by beekeepers and living wild on every continent except Antarctica.
• Territory: The whole colony defends its hive, and workers forage from flowers up to a few kilometers away.

What it eats

• Diet: A plant-eater that lives on nectar and pollen from flowers, turning nectar into honey to store.
• Favorite foods: Sweet nectar for energy and protein-rich pollen to feed the growing young in the hive.
• How it hunts: It does not hunt but forages, visiting many flowers to gather nectar and pollen and carry them home.

How it behaves

• How it moves: Flies swiftly between flowers and walks on six legs across the honeycomb inside the hive.
• When it is active: Active by day in warm weather, busiest when flowers bloom, and resting in the hive through cold nights and winter.
• Family life: Extremely social, living in a colony or hive of thousands, with one queen, many worker females, and some male drones.
• How it talks: Shares directions to flowers with a special 'waggle dance' and talks through scents and gentle touches.
• Babies: The single queen lays all the eggs, up to a couple thousand a day, and workers care for them until they hatch and grow.

Its place in nature

• Role in nature: A vital pollinator that helps flowers, fruits, and vegetables grow; birds and some insects sometimes eat bees.
• Conservation: Managed honey bees are common, but bees face challenges from disease, pesticides, and loss of wildflowers.
• Dangers: Dies mostly from cold, disease, mites, and pesticides; a whole colony works together to survive the winter.

Life & legacy

• How long it lives: A worker lives only a few weeks in busy summer, but a queen can live several years.
• In our culture: A worldwide symbol of hard work and teamwork, loved for the honey and beeswax people have gathered for ages.
• Where to see it: In gardens and meadows full of flowers, and at beekeeping farms and nature centers with safe viewing hives.
• Fun fact: To make just one small jar of honey, bees together visit about two million flowers.