Honey bees lead very complex social lives; but most bees live alone, don't make or store honey, and only very rarely sting. Approximately 85 percent of bee species are more or less solitary, although some species make nests close together, sometimes forming huge aggregations.
These clusters of individual nests are like a large apartment complex, with many individuals living in a common location, but each making their own way in the world. Some bees are communal, with several females of the same generation sharing a nest, and about one thousand species of bees live in very small, temporary colonies consisting of a queen and a few daughters.
These colonies die out when the weather turns cold, and only some pupa, or in some species the queen, survive the winter. During the warm weather months, the resources in the environment are shared, so as different flower species bloom, different bee species are seen for a few weeks and then they seemingly vanish.
Honey bee colonies, in contrast, are huge - often containing over fifty thousand bees - and they are perpetual, continuing on for many years following an annual cycle. The European or Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the most intensively studied bee species and probably the insect you imagine when you think of a typical bee. They are at home both in natural cavity nests and in artificial hives, and they have a caste system with a queen, workers, and drones.
Honey bees are specialized to be efficient pollinators, engaging in behaviors and having physical attributes (pollen baskets on their legs, for example) that are specifically aimed at efficiently gathering nectar and pollen to feed their brood. Given the nickname "pollen pigs" by some afficionados, honey bees are generalists in that they visit an exceptional diversity of plants to acquire food for their family. In the course of their foraging, they incidentally fertilize a wide range of plants, making it possible for the plants to reproduce and bear fruit.
In the winter, when the activity in the honey bee nest slows down to a crawl because there are no flowers to provide nectar supplies, the adult honey bees live for months in a quiescent state. Unlike other social insects like social wasps or bumblebees, they are not hibernators; they consume honey stores and shiver to generate the metabolic heat that allows them to withstand frigid winter temperatures.
They become active again when the first flowers begin to bloom, gathering supplies to sustain the future generations in the colony. In the warm weather, each honey bee only lives a few weeks, to be replaced by other adult bees as they reach maturity, and this relay of family members continues as long as the growing season lasts.
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1. How do honey bees develop and what do they eat
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