Concept

Bee

Overview

Bees are winged insects that form a monophyletic clade Anthophila within the superfamily Apoidea of the order Hymenoptera, with over 20,000 known species in seven recognized families. Some species – including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees – are social insects living in colonies, whereas over 90% of bee species – including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees – are solitary.

Unlike the closely related wasps and ants, who are carnivorous/omnivorous, bees are herbivores that specifically feed on nectar (nectarivory) and pollen (palynivory), the former primarily as a carbohydrate source for metabolic energy, and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients for their larvae. They are found on every continent except Antarctica, and in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, but they are small and often mistaken for wasps or flies. Bees range in size from tiny stingless bee species, whose workers are less than 2 millimeters (0.08 in) long, to the leafcutter bee Megachile pluto, the largest species of bee, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimeters (1.54 in). Vertebrate predators of bees include primates and birds such as bee-eaters; insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies.

Bees are best known for their ecological roles as pollinators and, in the case of the best-known species, the western honey bee, for producing honey, a regurgitated and dehydrated viscous mixture of partially digested monosaccharides kept as food storage of the bee colony. Pollination management via bees is important both ecologically and agriculturally, and the decline in wild bee populations has increased the demand and value of domesticated pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. Human beekeeping or apiculture (meliponiculture for stingless bees) has been practiced as a discipline of animal husbandry for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, through all phases of art and literature from ancient times to the present day, although primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere where beekeeping is far more common. In Mesoamerica, the Maya have practiced large-scale intensive meliponiculture since pre-Columbian times.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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1. There are several kinds of bees, the best are small, round, and variegated: another kind is large, like the anthrene: a third kind is called phor; this is black, and has a broad abdomen: the drone is the fourth, and is the largest of all; it has no sting, and is incapable of work, for which reason people often wrap something round their hives, so that the bees can enter, but the drones, being larger, cannot. 2…
Aristotle, Aristotle's History of Animals In Ten Books
Names Bee several times; states what Bee is.
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When overtaken by night in their expeditions, they watch till the morning, lying on their backs, in order to protect their wings from the action of the dew. It is not surprising that there have been persons who have made bees their exclusive study; Aristomachus of Soli, for instance, who for a period of fifty-eight years did nothing else; Philiscus of Thasos, also, surnamed Agrius, who passed his life in desert…
the Elder Pliny, The Boys' and Girls' Pliny
The chapter “CHAPTER III. BEES.” is titled for Bee; names Bee several times.
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I have alluded to a single instance of the separation and preservation of a particular stock of bees. Mr. Lowe[64] procured some bees from a cottager a few miles from Edinburgh, and perceived that they differed from the common bee in the hairs on the head and thorax being lighter coloured and more profuse in quantity. From the date of the introduction of the Ligurian bee into Great Britain we may feel sure that…
Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
The chapter “HIVE-BEES.” is titled for Bee; names Bee several times.
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