Honey bee
genus of insects From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
genus of insects From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A honey bee (or honeybee) is any bee that is a member of the genus Apis. They are all eusocial flying insects which live in colonies of various sizes.
| Honey bees Temporal range: | |
|---|---|
| |
| Western honey bee carrying pollen back to the hive | |
Scientific classification  | |
| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Class: | Insecta |
| Order: | Hymenoptera |
| Family: | Apidae |
| Subfamily: | Apinae |
| Tribe: | Apini Latreille, 1802 |
| Genus: | Apis Linnaeus, 1758 |
| Species | |
| |
They are only a small fraction of the 20,000 known species of bee. They produce and store honey and make perennial, colonial nests from wax. There are both stinging and stingless honey bees.
Honey bees are the only living members of the tribe Apini, all in the genus Apis. There are only seven species of honey bee, with a total of 44 subspecies.[1] Historically, from six to eleven species have been recognized.
Some other types of bees produce and store honey, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. The study of honey bees is known as ''melittology''.
The first Apis bees appear in the European fossil record at the Eocene–Oligocene boundary (34 million years ago). This shows that the bees were present in Europe by that time. Few fossil deposits are known from South Asia, the suspected region of honey bee origin.
No Apis species existed in the New World during human times before the introduction of A. mellifera by Europeans. Only one fossil species is known, a single 14-million-year-old specimen from Nevada.[2]
The close relatives of modern honey bees – bumblebees and stingless bees – are also social, but with smaller numbers in their families.
All honey bees (and perhaps all bees) use scent as a way to co-ordinate their activities. Nasonov's gland produces a pheromone used to get worker bees together.[3] The pheromone can attract workers to a settled swarm and draw bees who have lost their way back to the hive.
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