The Honey Bee

Part One · Meet the Honey Bee

A honey bee is a small flying insect, about as long as the nail on your pinky finger. Like all insects, it has six legs and a body in three parts: a head, a middle, and a back end. It also has four wings and two antennae, which it uses for smelling and feeling. And it has five eyes. Two big eyes sit on the sides of the head, and three tiny ones sit on top.

Honey bees do not live alone. They live in big family groups called colonies, and the home they build is called a hive. In summer, one colony can hold forty thousand bees or more, which is more than the number of people in many towns. Almost all of them are workers, and every worker is a female. The boys, called drones, are only a few hundred, and they do no work.

Each colony has one queen. She is the mother of nearly every bee in the hive, and she is a little longer than the workers. A queen can lay as many as one or two thousand eggs in a single day, and she may live for several years. A worker bee in summer lives only about six weeks. The queen is fed and cared for by the workers all around her.

Part Two · Inside the Hive

A worker bee has a different job at each age. When she is young, she cleans the hive and feeds the baby bees. Later she builds wax, guards the door, and stores food that other bees bring in. Only in the last weeks of her life does she fly outside to find flowers. A bee is busy from the day she hatches until the day she dies, and she hardly ever takes a break.

The inside of a hive is full of tiny six-sided rooms called cells. The bees make them out of wax, which comes from special parts on the underside of a worker's body. Honey bees use these cells to raise babies and to store honey. A six-sided shape fits together with no gaps, and it holds a lot while using very little wax. It is one of the smartest building plans in nature.

Bees can tell each other where to find food by dancing. When a worker finds a good patch of flowers, she goes back to the hive and does a waggle dance. She walks in a line while shaking her body, then loops around and does it again. The angle of the line shows which way to fly, using the sun as a guide. A longer waggle means the flowers are farther away.

Bees have to fly a long way to make honey. To fill just one jar, the bees in a hive may fly a distance longer than the trip around the Earth. A single worker bee makes only about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life. It takes a lot of bees working together to make a spoonful, and thousands of bees to make a jar. That is why a bee never wastes a trip.

Part Three · Flowers and Honey

A flying honey bee beats its wings about two hundred times every second. That fast beating is what makes the buzzing sound you hear. A bee can fly about fifteen miles an hour, which is about as fast as a kid on a bike going downhill. A bee can also carry heavy loads. Her load of pollen can be a big share of her own weight, and she still flies home.

Bees visit flowers to collect two foods. One is nectar, a sweet liquid that is found deep inside flowers. The other is pollen, a yellow powder. A bee presses pollen into little baskets of stiff hairs on her back legs, so you can sometimes see bright yellow lumps on a bee that is flying home. Pollen is the bees' main source of protein, and it helps the baby bees grow.

Nectar is not honey yet. Inside the hive, the bees pass the nectar from mouth to mouth and spread it in the cells. Then they fan it with their wings to dry out the water. When it turns thick and sticky, they cover the cell with a wax lid. Honey stored this way almost never spoils, so the bees can eat it all winter, and people have been eating it for thousands of years.

Bees also help the plants they visit. As a bee moves from flower to flower, pollen rubs off on her fuzzy body and drops onto the next flower. This is called pollination, and many plants need it to make seeds and fruit. Apples, blueberries, almonds, and pumpkins all depend on bees and other insects that carry pollen. Honey bees came to North America with settlers from Europe. Bees are not from here, but now they live on nearly every continent.

In winter, honey bees do not go to sleep. The workers crowd into a tight ball around the queen. They shiver their wing muscles to make heat, and they take turns moving from the cold outside edge to the warm middle. Even on a freezing day, the inside of the ball stays warm. Look closely at a flower this summer, and you may see a bee at work, carrying yellow pollen home.