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“The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee…gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.” – Leonardo da Vinci

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“For bees, the flower is the fountain of life/For flowers, the bee is the messenger of love.” – Kahlil Gibran

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“For bees, the flower is the fountain of life/For flowers, the bee is the messenger of love.” – Kahlil Gibran

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We need BEES. We may take them and other pollinators like butterflies and hoverflies for granted, but they're vital to stable, healthy food supplies and key to the varied, colourful and nutritious diets we need.

BEES are perfectly adapted to pollinate, helping plants grow, breed and produce food. They do so by transferring pollen between flowering plants and therefore keeping the cycle of life turning.

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The greatest contribution of bees and other pollinators is the pollination of nearly three quarters of the plants that produce 90% of the world's food. A third of the world's food production depends on bees, i.e. every third spoonful of food depends on pollination. ”Ending hunger is everyone's responsibility.”

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Globally there are more honey bees than other types of bee and pollinating insects, so it is the world's most important pollinator of food crops. It is estimated that one third of the food that we consume each day relies on pollination mainly by bees, but also by other insects, birds and bats.

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1. Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables. This means that they help other plants grow! Bees transfer pollen between the male and female parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit.

2. Honey bees live in hives (or colonies). The members of the hive are divided into three types:

Queen: One queen runs the whole hive. Her job is to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive’s next generation of bees. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behaviour of the other bees.

Workers: these are all female and their roles are to forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean and circulate air by beating their wings. Workers are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside the hive.

Drones: These are the male bees, and their purpose is to mate with the new queen. Several hundred live in each hive during the spring and summer. But come winter, when the hive goes into survival mode, the drones are kicked out!

3.  What are these buzzing bugs most famous for? Delicious honey! But did you know they produce honey as food stores for the hive during winter? Luckily for us, these efficient little workers produce 2-3 time more honey than they need, so we get to enjoy the tasty treat, too!

4. If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva (the newly hatched baby insects) and feeding it a special food called “royal jelly“. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.

5. Honey bees are fab flyers. They fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second!

6. Each bee has 170 odorant receptors, which means they have one serious sense of smell! They use this to communicate within the hive and to recognise different types of flowers when looking for food.

7. The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.

8. The queen can live up to five years. She is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!

9. Honey bees are also brilliant boogiers! To share information about the best food sources, they perform their ‘waggle dance’. When the worker returns to the hive, it moves in a figure-of-eight and waggles its body to indicate the direction of the food source. Cool, huh?

10. Sadly, over the past 15 years, colonies of bees have been disappearing, and the reason remains unknown. Referred to as ‘colony collapse disorder’, billions of honey bees across the world are leaving their hives, never to return. In some regions, up to 90% of bees have disappeared!

We can all do our bit to support these brilliant bugs, gang! Why not plant flowers rich in nectar, such as lavender and bluebells, which will help bees find the food they need? Also, be sure to choose local British honey, too, which will support our honey bees and their beekeepers!

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The greatest contribution of bees and other pollinators is the pollination of nearly three quarters of the plants that produce 90% of the world's food. A third of the world's food production depends on bees, i.e. every third spoonful of food depends on pollination. ”Ending hunger is everyone's responsibility.”

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Bees stinG. Fact

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A honey bee colony typically consists of three kinds of adult bees: workers, drones, and a queen. Several thousand worker bees cooperate in nest building, food collection, and brood rearing. Each member has a definite task to perform, related to its adult age.

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bee, (superfamily Apoidea), any of more than 20,000 species of insects in the suborder Apocrita (order Hymenoptera), including the familiar honeybee ( Apis) and bumblebee ( Bombus and Psithyrus) as well as thousands more wasplike and flylike bees. Adults range in size from about 2 mm to 4 cm (about 0.08-1.6 inches).

Bees are closely related to certain types of wasps, the principal biological difference between them being that bees (except for parasitic bees) provide their young with pollen and sometimes honey, whereas wasps feed their young animal food or provision their nests with insects or spiders. Associated with this difference in food preference are certain structural differences, the most essential being that wasps are covered with unbranched hairs, whereas bees have at least a few branched or feathered hairs to which pollen often clings.

Bees are entirely dependent on flowers for food, which consists of pollen and nectar, the latter sometimes modified and stored as honey. There is no doubt that bees and the flowers that they pollinate evolved simultaneously. As bees go from flower to flower gathering pollen, a small amount is rubbed from their bodies and deposited on the flowers they visit. This loss of pollen is significant, for it often results in cross-pollination of plants. The practical value of bees as pollinators is enormously greater than the value of their honey and wax production.

Male bees are usually short-lived and never collect pollen, nor do they have other responsibilities in connection with providing for the young. Female bees do all the work of nest making and provisioning and usually have special anatomical structures that assist them in carrying pollen. Most bees are polylectic, meaning that they gather pollen from a wide variety of flowers. However, some bees collect pollen only from flowers of certain families, others from flowers of certain colours. Oligolectic bees gather pollen from only a few related kinds of flowers. The mouth parts of bees, like the pollen-collecting and pollen-carrying devices, seem to be adapted to different flowers.

Most bees are solitary, or nonsocial, in habit and do not live in colonies. In these species each female makes her own nest (usually a burrow in the ground) and provisions it. Among such bees there are no castes. Some solitary bees make chimneys or turrets at the nest entrance, others nest in wood or in the pith of twigs or canes. Most solitary bees are short-lived as adults. Some species may be in flight only a few weeks of the year, having spent the rest of the year in their cells as eggs, larvae, pupae, and young adults.

Solitary bees provide all of the food the larvae require to complete development when the cells are sealed. Social bees, such as the bumblebee and the honeybee, feed their young progressively. For the life cycle of social bees, see bumblebee; honeybee.

The Apoidea includes seven families: Colletidae, which are primitive wasplike bees consisting of five or six subfamilies, about 45 genera, and some 3,000 species; Andrenidae, which are medium- and large-sized solitary mining bees, including some parasitic species; Halictidae (mining, or burrowing, bees), the best-known of which is Dialictus zephyrus, one of many so-called sweat bees, which are attracted to perspiration; Melittidae, bees that mark a transitional form between the lower and the higher bees; Megachilidae ( leaf-cutting and mason bees), noted for their elaborate nest structures; Stenotritidae, a small family of Australian bees; and Apidae (bumblebees, honeybees, carpenter bees, cuckoo beeds, and digger, or mining, bees).

The so-called killer bee is a hybrid between an African subspecies and a subspecies of European honeybee. The Africanized honeybee resulted from the accidental release of African honeybees in Brazil in 1957and their subsequent crossbreeding with local European honeybees. Although it is not more venomous than the European form, it reacts much more quickly to perceived threats to the colony, attacks in number, pursues for a longer time and greater distance, and takes longer to calm down. They have been considered responsible for hundreds of deaths.

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Bees make up more than 20,000 species of insects in the suborder Apocrita (order Hymenoptera), including the familiar honeybee and bumblebee as well as thousands more wasplike and flylike bees.