Honey Bee
Wax-building, honey-storing social insects that keep farms and orchards pollinated.
Honey bees are eusocial flying insects of the genus Apis, part of Apidae, the biggest family of bees. They live in large colonies that build long-lasting nests inside cavities, filling them with six-sided cells of wax they secrete themselves. Surplus nectar is processed into honey and stored as food, which makes their hives a target for honey badgers, bears and people alike. Although they are only a sliver of the roughly 20,000 bee species known, honey bees are the group humans know best and the most useful insects in agriculture and horticulture, thanks to crop pollination and products such as honey, beeswax, royal jelly and venom.
Quick Facts
- Type species
- Apis mellifera
Facts from the source article.
Background
Every honey bee is a nectar-feeding pollinator whose natural home is mainland Afro-Eurasia. The genus seems to have arisen in South and Southeast Asia, where all living species other than the western honey bee are native, including the oldest surviving lineages, Apis florea and Apis andreniformis. Fossil Apis first turn up in European deposits at the Eocene–Oligocene boundary, about 34 mya. The New World had no native honey bees in human times; its only fossil species, Apis nearctica, is known from one specimen from Nevada about 14 million years old. Europeans later carried subspecies of the western honey bee to South America, North America and Australia, so today the insects live on every continent except Antarctica. The western species has been kept by people at least since the Egyptian pyramids were built.
Did You Know?
- Entomologist Robert Snodgrass argued the name should be written as two words, honey bee, because the insect really is a bee.
- Apis is simply the Latin word for bee.
- Some stingless bees, such as the genus Melipona, also store honey but are not true honey bees.
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