Bees are flying insects with round, furry bodies and narrow waists. They are closely related to wasps and ants. Many species protect themselves by using a sting on their abdomen, which injects painful venom. These stinging species usually have black and yellow stripes to warn other insects that they are dangerous. Bees feed on pollen and nectar, which they collect from flowers using their long tongue, called a proboscis. There are 25,000 known species of bee. Some types of bee live in colonies, while others are solitary.

Nests

Bees may nest underground or in hollow trees or other small spaces. They build hexagonal compartments, called cells, inside their nests. They use the cells to store their eggs, honey or pollen. A cluster of cells is called a comb.

The leafcutter bee makes cells from discs cut from leaves. It builds its nest in the ground or in crevices in trees or buildings. The mason bee makes its nest inside plants and constructs its cells out of mud. Honeybees build nests in crevices or hanging from trees. They use wax, produced by glands in their bodies, to make cells.

Pollination

Bees feed on pollen and nectar from flowers. When a bee drinks nectar from a flower, some pollen sticks to the bee. At the next flower it visits, the pollen brushes off. In this way, bees carry pollen from the male part of a flower to a female part, enabling the flower to reproduce. Insects that do this are known as pollinators. Bees are extremely important pollinators.

Honeybees:
queens and drones

Honeybees are types of bees that produce and store honey, and which construct their nests, home to a colony of up to 60,000 bees, out of wax. Within one colony there are several different groups, or castes, of bee, each with its own specific job. The queen is a large female that has mated with a male and lays eggs. Queens develop from normal larvae that have been fed only on a rich substance called royal jelly. There is only one queen in each colony. Drones are male bees whose sole task is to mate with the queen. There are only a few drones in each colony.

Workers

Workers are female bees that cannot lay eggs. Young workers repair and build new cells. After this, they act as guards at the entrance to the nest. Older workers go out to collect pollen and nectar and bring it back to the nest. The workers also feed and look after the queen bee and the larvae.

Starting a new colony

When a honeybee colony gets crowded, workers start to feed the larvae on royal jelly, a nutritious, milky substance made by worker bees. As a result, these young will grow into new queens. The old queen now leaves the hive. She is followed by a train of workers, forming a mass of bees called a swarm. They protect her and set about building a new hive. Meanwhile, in the old colony, the first queen to hatch out kills all the other queen larvae, ensuring that she becomes the only queen. She then mates and lays her eggs. With some other types of bee, it is the new queens that leave to start new colonies.

Nectar and honey

Honey is a sweet-tasting liquid made when nectar mixes with enzymes in the bee’s stomach. They “chew” flower nectar until it turns into sticky honey. The mixture is regurgitated (sicked up) into cells, where it is stored as food for the colony. Honeybees are often kept by humans for their honey.

Honeybees perform the "waggle dance", a figure-of-eight movement to show other bees where flowers are located. The movements communicate how far away the flowers are and in what direction they lie. The direction the bee moves in, as it performs its dance, indicates where the flowers are. The length of the "waggle" part of the dance indicates the distance.

Life of a bumblebee

The bumblebee is a fluffy black and yellow bee. The movement of its flight muscles makes a loud buzzing sound.

Queen bumblebees hibernate underground over the winter. In spring, they wake up and start new colonies in burrows or piles of grass. The queen lays her eggs and stores pollen in "pots" made out of wax. The eggs will hatch out into workers.

The workers forage for food, while the queen spends most of her time laying eggs and caring for the larvae that hatch out. Towards the end of the summer, the queen bumblebee lays several eggs in unusually large egg cells. The young from these eggs are given extra food by the workers so that they will grow into new queens. The queen also lays a batch of unfertilized eggs. These will develop into male bees.

The males and the new queens leave the colony and mate. They live off nectar and pollen and spend nights sheltering under flowers or in holes in the ground. The males die after they have mated, along with the old queen and her workers. The new queens look for burrows where they will hibernate for the winter. In spring, they will emerge to start new colonies.

Stingless bees

Stingless bees, also known as meliponines, are a large group of bees (roughly 500 species) found in most tropical or subtropical regions of the world. About half of them are native to the Amazon rainforest, where they pollinate more than 80% of the plants. Stingless bees are closely related to honey bees and bumblebees. Although they do have small stingers, they are not used for the bees' defence. They rely instead on their powerful bite or the unpleasant smell they give off. Meliponines are not the only type of bee incapable of stinging: all male bees and many female bees of other bee families also cannot sting.