Bee facts

• Most bee species don’t live in hives, and over 70% of bees build their solitary nests in the ground.¹
• Honeycombs are made of hundreds of precisely measured hexagonal shapes; this shape likely stores the largest amount of honey for the least amount of work and resources.
• In the course of her lifetime, a single worker honeybee will produce approximately 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.
• As a byproduct of their consumption of nectar, bees not only make honey, they also make bread, royal jelly, propolis and beeswax. For this reason, bees are sometimes referred to as “master chemists and chemical engineers.”
• Not all bees are busy workers. Several species of parasitic bee invade other species’ hives, where they lay their eggs and leech off their resources
• Honeybees flap their wings a whopping 230 times per second, and a worker honeybee can fly as fast as 21 to 28km/h.
• Honeybees can understand the concept of zero and can count to at least four in order from left to right. They can also recognise faces and remember them for up to two days.
• Bumblebees are thought to be able to feel pain and joy.

While bumblebees and honeybees are usually the first to come to mind when one thinks of bees, the Anthophila group is dazzlingly diverse and comprises seven large families and more than 20,000 species. That’s more diversity than all bird and mammal species combined.²

The Apidae family includes the most economically important group of bees which makes honey and pollinate crops because it includes bumblebees and honeybees. There are almost 6,000 species of Apidaes, making it the largest bee family.³

The Megachilidae is made up of more than 4,000 other stout-bodied, solitary species and this family includes leaf-cutting and mason bees. Halictidae bees, meanwhile, are mining and burrowing bees, and are often also called sweat bees because they’re attracted to sweat.⁴

The Andrenidae family are ground-nesting, solitary bees, most famous for pollinating apple trees.⁵ Colletidae are wasp-like bees that mostly inhabit Australia and South America and are sometimes dubbed "plasterer bees" because they plaster walls with their nests. About 200 species of solitary bees make up the Melittidae family, while the Stenotritidae family from Australia comprises just 21 species.⁶

Entomologists who specialise in studying bees are called melittologists.

Bees evolved from stinging, carnivorous wasps that lived 120 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period in a supercontinent called western Gondwana, which is now Africa and South America.⁷

Researchers know about the prehistoric ancestors of bees because many insects were preserved for millions of years in hardened tree resin that turned into amber, providing well-conserved specimens for detailed examination.⁸

When the continents started to form 66 million years ago, during the Paleogene period, bees started to evolve and spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere, where they thrived.⁹

Bees evolved from wasps, so the two insects are closely related.¹⁰ In fact, they are part of the same order, hymenoptera, which also includes ants and sawflies. There are quite a few similarities between bees and wasps: both can sometimes sting, both often sport yellow and black colours, both can be social or solitary, both are pollinators. Even experienced scientists can struggle to tell some species apart at a glance.¹¹

However, there are a couple of subtle tell-tale signs that can help differentiate wasps from bees.¹² Wasps are a little thinner and have narrower waists, often referred to as "wasp waist". And while they have four wings just like bees, theirs tend to be a little longer and when they fly, their two thin long legs hang straight beneath their body.¹³ Crucially, wasps tend to have a slick, bald hairdo, while bees are largely more hairy and fluffy – honeybees typically have almost three million hairs on their bodies – because fluff comes in handy when collecting and storing pollen.¹⁴

While a bee's diet largely consists of pollen and nectar from flowers, wasps hunt other insects and lap up sugars from rotting fruits in addition to pollen.¹⁵ Wasps sometimes eat bees too. Wasps are also disproportionately disliked by the general public compared with bees, even though they’re often equally important to the environment.¹⁶

Of the 20,700+ species of bees, only between seven and eleven species (and more than 40 subspecies) have been recognised as honeybees and designated the genus Apis.¹⁷

The main species is the western honey bee, or Apis mellifera. It is thought to have originated in Asia or Africa, and it was domesticated to produce honey for human consumption as far back as Ancient Egypt.¹⁸ 

A study from 2023 found there are approximately 102 million managed hives of Apis mellifera worldwide, but it’s thought that there are between two and three times as many wild colonies in nature. This bee species is as responsible for crop pollination as all other bee species combined.¹⁹

All other Apis species can only be found in southern Asia, like the Apis cerana, the Himalayan giant honey bee, the Philippine honey bee and Koschevnikov's honey bee.

But there’s more: bees formally called honeybees aren’t the only bees to make honey. Up to 800 species of bees make some form of honey, although most of it cannot be harvested by humans.²⁰ Bumblebees make honey, for example, albeit it in very small quantities and just to feed their queen.²¹     

Honeybees and several species of stingless bee also make honey, not from flower nectar but from the sap secretion of aphids, called honeydew, which they collect from leaves, stems and bark.²²

Bees can be found anywhere that flowers need pollination by insects, which means they live all over the world, except for Antarctica.²³ Although many species are found in tropical Asia, there’s more variety in species in temperate climates.    

Bees can thrive in a wide range of locations, from gardens, plantations and orchards to wild marshes, sand dunes, forests and grasslands. Even urban gardens, where honeybees and bumblebees are most popular, can play host to a wide variety of species.²⁴ 

Sadly, around a quarter of bee species known to science haven’t been spotted in the wild since the 1990s.²⁵

Some bee species, such as honeybees, bumblebees, some stingless bees and some sweat bees, live social lives. Some are only a little social, while others are very social, a lifestyle scientists define as "eusocial".

Being eusocial means the bees live in a very elaborate and sophisticated social community structure. Every member of the colony has a specific role according to their caste and the genes they were born with: they're either a queen, a worker or a drone.²⁶ Each role contributes to the success of the colony in its own way. 

The main duty of a queen bee is to lay eggs.²⁷ Some produce up  to 250,000 a year, and possibly more than a million in their lifetime to keep the colony populated with females and males.²⁸ Female bees are worker bees, charged with a series of different tasks according to their age: younger worker bees make wax for the honeycomb and feed the young, while older worker bees take care of foraging far and wide to bring back food to the colony, as well as protecting it. Male bees are called drones, and their sole purpose is to propagate their colony. They live for a couple of months and every day they use their gigantic eyes to look for queens to mate with and start a new colony.²⁹

However, only between 5 and 15% of bee species are defined as social bees. Most – including leafcutter and mason bees – are in fact solitary and don't live in colonies at all. There's no strict division of labour for these species; they forage their own pollen to feed themselves, lay eggs in a safe spot in a simple nest and then leave a small lump of pollen with nectar so the larvae once hatched can develop on their own.³⁰

Still, sometimes solitary bees will share nesting sites with other solitary bees for the sake of protection. And some species like to do both: Halictus rubicundus, a type of sweat bee, is usually more social in warmer climes and solitary in cooler ones.³¹

When bee colonies get too numerous, they will swarm.³² A new queen will be born among the workers and inherit the colony, while the original queen and half of her workers leave the nest, swarm for anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days, before finding a new place to call home.³³

This can happen at any time throughout the year, but it’s most common in late spring or early summer. Some buzzing bee swarms can be so powerful they generate an electrical charge of up to 1,000 volts per metre – more than a storm cloud.³⁴

No, very few bee species live in hives. Still, while not all bees live together with their sister bees in sophisticated hives, both solitary and social bees make ingenious nests for themselves, finding homes in a variety of interesting places.³⁵

Over 70% of bees dig their nests in the ground.³⁶ These can be anywhere from a few centimetres to three metres deep, and the bees powerfully bulldoze the soil out of the way with their mandibles and bodies. Such nests are usually single, but thousands of them can be found close together.

The majority of other bees are cavity-nesting bees, using holes in soft, dead wood, hollow stems and reeds, abandoned rodent burrows and bird boxes, gaps between walls and beams and even in thick grass. Females of the Osmia bicolor species nest in abandoned snail shells.³⁷

Many bees are named for where they choose to call home. Carpenter bees, for example, like to make their nests in wood and pith, while architect bees construct free-standing nests using anything from resin and mud to shells, stones and animal fur.³⁸

Most bees rely entirely on flowers for their nutrition; they lap up the flower’s sugary nectar for carbohydrates and then get their protein, fats, lipids, vitamins and minerals from pollen, which is surprisingly rich in proteins.³⁹

Some studies have suggested that bees will taste a plant's pollen and only go back to those flowers that are the most delicious.⁴⁰

Most bee species look for pollen in a wide range of unrelated flowers – these are called polylectic bees. Other bee species feed from flowers that look the same or are closely genetically related, and have evolved mouthparts that match these flower species.⁴¹ Other species take it even further – Macropis europaea, for example, is monolectic and it only collects pollen from the yellow loosestrife plant. Pollen-specialist bees such as these are more endangered than non-specialised bees because they’re more at risk of their preferred plant disappearing.⁴²

Around 440 species of bees like to stock up on floral oils to nourish and protect their offspring, absorbing them on their spongy hindlegs.⁴³ Vulture bees in South America feed on carrion, making them meat-eating bees.⁴⁴ A species of social stingless bee from Brazil called Scaptotrigona depilis has evolved to just feed on fungi.⁴⁵ It also cultivates the fungus inside its nest by feeding it pollen and nectar and then feeding the harvest to their larvae.

When a bee lands on a flower to feed, it picks up small grains of the plant's soft and gooey pollen on its body and carries it on to the next flower it lands on. (Some bees end up completely covered in pollen).⁴⁶ In doing so, bees provide a crucial service to the plants: they pollinate them.

Using insects for pollination is something flowers have been doing for thousands of years, well before bees even evolved.⁴⁷ However, today, bees are the most efficient pollinating insects because they’ve co-evolved with the plants they pollinate. In doing so, they've developed helpful features such as long tongues, hairy bodies, hollow fuzz baskets for pollen on their back legs, electrostatic energy to attract the pollen to their bodies, and special vibrating back muscles to buzz inside the flower and loosen its pollen.

Bee pollination exponentially improves the quality and quantity of fruits, nuts and oils, and is the building blocks of entire ecosystems and agricultural structures.⁴⁸ Almost 90% of wild plants depend on bee pollination, and out of the 100 crops responsible for over 90% of the global food supply, at least 71 are pollinated by bees, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).⁴⁹

While domesticated European honeybees get most of the credit for crop pollination, wild bees also contribute significantly to moving around large quantities of pollen for both wild plants and crops.⁵⁰ Squash bees pollinate zucchini, squash, gourds, pumpkins and more, while solitary, ground-nesting blueberry bees live to pollinate the tiny blue fruits.⁵¹

Inside the hive, honeybees share information about their foraging successes with their fellow workers. Once they’re returned from a good flower patch with loads of nectar and pollen, they share a little bit of the collected goods with their colony-mates for a taste, and then they give them specific directions on how to get there. They do this by performing an eight-shaped, buzzing movement known as the "waggle dance". They buzz their behinds to demonstrate the general direction and distance where the best flower can be found; the angle of the waggle indicates the direction of the jackpot and the duration indicates the distance, while the more delicious the food, the more funky and ecstatic the movements.⁵²

It's thought that this dance language could be more than 40 million years old.⁵³ The tradition is an example of culture among the colonies because young bees often have to learn the dance from more experienced bees. In one 2023 experiment, honeybees that didn’t have an older bee tutor made more mistakes when dancing to share the direction and distance of the best flower patch.⁵⁴

When honeybees go out to forage on flowers, they suck the nectar through their straw-like tongues, evaporate some of its water inside their mouth and store it in the first chamber of their stomachs, a segment specially designed to hold up to 80% of a bee’s weight in nectar.⁵⁵ There, enzymes start to break down the nectar into simpler sugars that cannot solidify.

The honeybee makes its way back to the hive and regurgitates the processed sugary solution into the mouths of other bees, who are charged with packing into the small beeswax hexagon chambers.⁵⁶ They then fan the nectar with their wings to help it evaporate further until it becomes closer to what we know as honey. Once the honey is ready, the bees seal the honeycomb segment with beeswax and store it for the winter.

During the cold months, when most flowers will no longer be in bloom, bees will use their stored honey to feed themselves and their new hatchlings with the sticky, energy-rich, golden snack. Honey isn't just a delicious meal, but its nutritious composition also improves their longevity and can act as a repellent against hive pathogens.⁵⁷

A single worker honeybee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers each trip to fill up its special nectar-holding stomach and collect up to 100mg of nectar per trip.⁵⁸ In the course of her lifetime, she’ll produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.⁵⁹ In a buzzing colony, tens of thousands of forager bees will have flown a distance of almost three times around the world and visited a total of around 8 million flowers. By the end of summer, a big colony will have around upwards of 50kg of honey.⁶⁰

Research suggests that honey from honeybees and stingless bees alike can have many healthy antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties for humans.⁶¹

Worker bees are responsible for making wax. They produce wax by eating honey and then secreting flaky, sweat-like sticky substances from four pairs of glands on their abdomen.⁶² These flakes are chewed up by other bees, softened, and modelled into storage pods to stash food and nurture eggs and larvae.⁶³ This process forms the foundation of the honeycomb and the social structure of the hive.

The beeswax is moulded into perfectly precise hexagonal cells because the hexagon is the most efficient shape for strength and storage with the least effort and material.⁶⁴ Scientists say that, because of this, bees are excellent mathematicians and engineers.

Not all hives look like one big fruit-shaped oval, though. Stingless bees build honeycombs in spiralling shapes on several levels, and researchers are still trying to figure out why.⁶⁵

Some bee species, like certain ants, choose to take advantage of other bee species that are doing well for themselves.⁶⁶ These exploitative bees are known as brood parasites and, according to researchers, they “represent a substantial fraction of global bee diversity”.⁶⁷ Brood parasites don’t make their own nests or collect pollen for their young, and they only visit flowers when they need a little bit of energy for themselves. These bees invade the nests of other pollen-collecting species, secretly laying their eggs so that their hatchlings will eat all of the host’s pollen and outcompete them.⁶⁸

Examples of brood parasites include the Cape honeybee, Bombus hyperboreus, and cuckoo bees.⁶⁹

Adult bees can range in size from the size of a grain of rice to a large almond. The tiny Perdita minima bee, measures around 2mm long in body length, while the largest species of bumblebees, the Bombus dahlbomii from Patagonia – sometimes dubbed “flying mice” – and the largest species of leafcutter bee, Megachile pluto, can reach up to 40mm.⁷⁰ These bee giants are both four times larger than an average European honey bee, which is around the size of a bean.

While many bees are famous for their black and yellow stripes, they actually come in a variety of colours, shapes and sizes.⁷¹

Augochloropsis bees, also known as sweat bees, often come clad in vibrant, shiny, metallic greens, turquoise, and blues.⁷²  Agapostemon angelicus bees are striped yellow and black on their lower bodies but have a distinctly shiny green head and thorax.⁷³ Megachile lanata is a fuzzy, bright orange colour with a black abdomen striped with thin white lines.⁷⁴  Perdita luteola bees are tiny and fully clad in a pale yellow.⁷⁵ Anthophora affabilis are furry, black, and white, while Lasioglossum morio are dark green.⁷⁶ Osmia rufa bees are also known as red mason bees because of their gingery hair.⁷⁷ Nomada bifasciata bees have dark orange legs, Sapyga centrata bees have iridescent wings and Hylaeus mesillaes, commonly called masked bees, are jet black.⁷⁸

Bees have two sets of wings: a small inner set and a larger outer set, which they can flap up to 230 times per second, rotating them a full 360 degrees from above their back to in front of their face.⁷⁹

A worker honeybee can fly as fast as 21 to 28km/h, according to the British Beekeepers Association, and about 17km/h when carrying pollen and plant material back to the hive.⁸⁰

Bees have a total of five eyes: two compound eyes on the sides of their heads and three small, simple eyes in the centre.⁸¹ They see the world uniquely – they do not perceive red and similar wavelengths like yellow and orange, but they can see colours such as blue-green, blue, violet, and “bee purple” thanks to their ultraviolet receptors.⁸²

Studies show honeybees only have 10 taste receptors, but they can tell the difference between sweet, sour, bitter, and salt.⁸³ Fortunately, bees also have 170 receptors for odours – more than fruit flies or mosquitoes – suggesting they heavily use their sense of smell to determine their surroundings.⁸⁴ An acute sense of smell allows them to use sophisticated pheromone signals to communicate, with male drones able to detect a queen available for mating up to 60m away.⁸⁵

Bees use their antennae to touch and gather information about their surroundings, such as texture of the flower petals they’re feeding off. These antennae also detect vibrations and electric fields, as do the hairs on their bodies and legs.⁸⁶

Just like ants and wasps, bees go through several stage in thier life cycle, from a tiny egg to a fully-formed adult.⁸⁷ The egg develops into a legless larva, then it goes through several moults until it becomes a pupa, during which the insect undergoes complete metamorphosis and emerges as an adult. 

In a social hive, when a queen lays eggs, the unfertilised eggs will become male drones, whose primary role is reproduction, while all the fertilised eggs become female workers tasked with taking care of the hive and foraging for food.⁸⁸

The average worker honeybee lives for up to 38 days in the summer, while the queen can live up to two years. Workers die more easily because they put themselves in harm's way by leaving the hive to forage. In winter, however, they can live up to 200 full days.⁸⁹

Despite some of them having a brain the size of a poppy seed, research suggests that bees are exceptionally smart, sentient and have sophisticated cultures, and rich inner lives.

Honeybees have been shown to be able to understand the concept of zero and count to at least four – and even more if incentivised with a nice snack.⁹⁰ They can recognise faces too (and remember them for up to two days!) and make fast and accurate decisions.⁹¹

Researchers have managed to train bumblebees to play a football-like game in return for a sugary treat, and while doing so they noted several of the insects were engaging with the miniature balls and rolling them around – as if they were playing for enjoyment.⁹² Bees are also seen tending to their wounds, suggesting that they feel some sort of pain.⁹³

Bumblebees can learn from each other how to solve a puzzle box so complex that they wouldn’t have been able to crack it on their own – something experts think demonstrates a level of culture so sophisticated that only humans were thought to possess it.⁹⁴ They can use tools and share this knowledge about the use of tools with other colony members too.⁹⁵

After touching an object in the dark and without seeing it bumblebees can later recognise it by sight alone.⁹⁶

No, most bees do not sting. There are hundreds of species of solitary, stingless bees, scientifically known as Meliponini that are unable to sting as their stingers so small they cannot penetrate anything.⁹⁷

Honeybees, bumblebees and carpenter bees are the most common stingers. However, only females can sting because their stingers are modified ovipositors, organs originally used for laying eggs. Worker bees have barbed stingers that remain lodged inside the victim once they’ve been deployed, often ripping off the lower part of the bee's abdomen and killing them (this usually occurs with mammals rather than other insects).⁹⁸ Queen bees possess slick, spiky stingers that can be used several times, though they seldom leave the colony. Male bees don’t have stingers at all.⁹⁹

Overall, though, bees are not aggressive and only sting when threatened or provoked, especially near their hive.

Bees have several predators out in the wild, who may like to feed on them, their larvae, their honey or their wax.¹⁰⁰ Creatures with a taste for honey are known as "mellivorous".

Badgers, bears, raccoons, mice and skunks often dig up bee nests.¹⁰¹ Birds such as rainbow bee-eaters, shrikes, flycatchers, swifts, and swallows snack on bees mid-flight, while honey buzzard birds and the greater honeyguide birds attack bees' nests directly, lapping up their larvae and wax.¹⁰²

Other insects also have a penchant for bees and their products, including wasps and hornets, hive beetles, dragonflies and praying mantises. Crab spiders – super-colourful, daintily-patterned spiders – camouflage themselves within flowers, lying in wait to ambush pollinating bees.¹⁰³

Bees also have smaller predators that eat them up from the inside: parasites.¹⁰⁴ The pollen mite, varroa mites, and phoretic mites all infest bees in various ways, some living inside their breathing organs, others consuming the bees’ fat reserves.

Due to climate change, biodiversity loss, air pollution, and the aggressive use of chemical insecticides and pesticides, the number of native solitary bees around the world has been dropping drastically throughout the years.¹⁰⁵

The reason bee populations can decline so quickly is that if several worker bees in a colony are killed or die, it triggers a domino effect called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).¹⁰⁶ In CCD, the queen bee and larvae left behind cannot sustain themselves alone, and die, leading to the sudden collapse of the entire colony.

Featured image © Adriana Mehner | Instagram

Fun fact image © David Clode | Unsplash

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