Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables. This means that they help other plants grow! Bees transfer pollen between the male and female parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit.

Honey bees live in colonies in structures called beehives or honeycombs. A beehive can accommodate around 50,000 bees. The architectural complexity of beehives has long fascinated humans. Honey bees build their unique homes from wax secretions their body produces. The comb is double layered and has countless six-sided cells.

Apis dorsata, the giant honey bee, builds large combs with diameters as wide as nine feet. In these honeycomb cells, bees store honey, nectar, and pollen. Bees also start their lives in these cells as eggs laid by the queen bee.

One queen runs the whole hive. Her job is to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive’s next generation of bees. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behavior of the other bees. The queen bee is the most important member of the bee colony. Eggs deposited in special large vertical cells known as queen cells develop into a virgin queen. Virgin queens feed on royal jelly. The royal jelly is a milky substance secreted by a special gland found in the worker bee’s head. It is also called bee milk, and workers, drones, and queen larvae feed on this initially.

With over 1000 bee species in South Africa, most are solitary bees . Only a very few of these are social bees, including the honey bee. Although there are some species of solitary bees that nest in colonies, each female solitary bee independently constructs her own nest. Solitary bee species have varying nest-building behaviours. Nests may be made in pre-existing cavities such as in hollow reeds, or in tunnels in wood or stalks that have been made and abandoned by other insects. Some species, such as carpenter bees, make their own tunnels in wood. Carder bees make external nests using plant material or partition their nests with plant fibres. Daubers make and partition their nests out of mud or resin. Others, known as mining bees, make or use tunnels in the ground.

Solitary bee nests consist of a series of chambers that are partitioned off from each other. The female fills each chamber with a mixture of nectar and pollen and lays an egg in each chamber. She does this sequentially sealing and partitioning each chamber as she goes. Some solitary bees, known as leaf-cutters, line and partition their nests with small fragments of leaf. Some gardeners, ignoring the fact that the pollinating services of bees are invaluable, eradicate leaf-cutter bees, even though the tidy notches the bees cut from leaves do not harm the plants. Other species of solitary bees partition their nests with resin, wood fragments, fine plant hairs or fibres, or mud. When the eggs hatch, the bee larvae feed on their supply of nectar and pollen, they then pupate before emerging, usually in the spring as adult bees, whereupon they mate, the females nest, and the cycle continues.

The special food, royal jelly or bee milk, contains water, carbohydrates, proteins, mineral salts, and vitamins. Vitamins in it include vitamin B6 and pantothenic acid. Vitamin B6 aids the breakdown of amino acids and pantothenic breaks down fats and carbohydrates.

These are all female and their roles are to forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean and circulate air by beating their wings. Workers are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside the hive.

The bee is the only insect that makes food that humans can eat; honey. Worker Foragers collect nectar from about 2 million flowers just to make around ½ a kilo of honey. The average worker produces one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

Honey bee workers exhibit changes in their duties as they grow older. Newly emerged workers are responsible for cleaning the honeycomb cells to prepare them for eggs or food storage. In a few days, they take on duties like taking out waste, processing nectar, feeding the queen and larvae. They also work to maintain air circulation and keep temperatures stable.

Their wax gland becomes active in their second week, and now they start to help with building and repairs of the comb. Workers’ wax glands become active, and they help build and repair the comb while continuing to tend the queen and feed other workers.

From their 12th to 25th day, workers take on guard roles and defend the hive from infiltration and attack. After three weeks, their wax and food glands shrink, and they begin to fly out on foraging duty.

These are the male bees, and their purpose is to mate with the new queen. Several hundred live in each hive during the spring and summer. But come winter, when the hive goes into survival mode, the drones are kicked out!

• Each Honey Bee from the same hive has their own specific color identification.
• Bees are vegetarians Flowers provide everything that a bee would ever need for nutrition; pollen and nectar. Bees, however, have particular preferences for the pollen they gather. Polylectic bees collect pollen from a large variety of flowers. Oligolectic bees consume pollen with certain peculiarities, like flowers from a certain family or of a certain color. This restricts them to a smaller range of flowers to feed on.
• Bees forage for food only during daylight but continuously remain active in the hive. They stay close to home and forage within a 3-kilometer radius around the hive. When resources are scarce, honey bees fly distances of 8-13 km to search for food or water.
• The reason bees are so noisy is because they beat their wings 11,400 times in one minute!
• Only female bees can sting. Male bees don’t have stingers.
• Honey bees communicate through a series of dance moves.
• Bees can sense the hormone a human gives off when they’re scared. If they feel their hive is threatened they’ll attack.
• Every bee has 5 eyes and see UV light !!
• These amazing insects have eyes that can detect UV light wavelengths that are beyond the visible spectrum. This is how they can see flower markings that only show in UV light and find the sun on cloudy days. A part of the honey bee’s eyes is attuned to polarized light, which it uses to navigate.
• Honey bees communicate with dance
• Honey bees work together to find food, and when one bee finds flower patch food sources, it relays the information to the others through dance. We call the bee’s dance the waggle dance; it consists of a short straight run and a circular movement. 
• The dance tells the other bees the location and distance of the food source to the hive and the sun. It even expresses such things as the size and quality of the flower patch.
• Apart from honey, we get beeswax, propolis, pollen, and even bee milk which are used for cosmetics and homemade remedies. Some researchers suggest that the venom of honey bees may have medicinal value in treating inflammation or auto-immune diseases.
• Bees are an essential part of our ecosystem, and without them, food supplies could be seriously affected. They are pollinators that work their whole life to fertilize flowering plants. Clearing hectares and hectares of bee habitats can put their population at risk.