Honey Bee

Habitat

Honey bees live in cavities — hollow trees, rock crevices, and the wooden boxes of managed hives — anywhere they can build vertical comb shielded from rain and wind. The species is native to Europe, Africa, and Western Asia but has been carried by humans to every continent except Antarctica, and feral colonies now live across most of the temperate and tropical world.

Behavior

A honey bee colony is one of the most refined social organizations on Earth. A single fertile queen lays every egg. Twenty thousand to eighty thousand sterile female workers do every other job — foragers, nurses, guards, builders, undertakers, ventilators — rotating through roles as they age. A small number of male drones exist only to mate. Foragers communicate the direction, distance, and quality of nectar sources to their hive-mates through the waggle dance, a figure-eight choreography on the comb whose decoding won Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize in 1973. A honey bee will visit roughly two million flowers to produce a single pound of honey.

Marginalia

• Honey bee colonies maintain the inside of the hive at a constant 95°F year-round — workers fan their wings to cool it in summer and cluster around the queen for warmth in winter.
• About a third of every bite of food eaten in the United States depends on bee pollination — almonds, apples, blueberries, melons, alfalfa, and dozens of other crops.
• A worker bee lives roughly six weeks in summer; winter bees live up to six months. The queen can live five to seven years.
• Hexagonal honeycomb is the geometrically most efficient way to divide a plane into cells of equal area — bees solved the math problem millions of years before mathematicians proved it.
• Honey is the only food made by an insect that humans eat directly. Found in Egyptian tombs and still edible after 3,000 years, it is essentially the only food that does not spoil.