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Today on Animal Fact Files we’re talking about bees. Most people know bees as the busy, honey producing animals - but that’s just barely scratching the surface on bees as a whole. Bees are sometimes referred to as vegetarian wasps. They’re classified in the same order as wasps, but they form their own group in which all bees are classified. This is called a clade. A clade is a group of animals in which all known species of that group can be traced back to a single ancestor; and the clade name for bees translates to “flower loving” which is pretty dang apt - even though some bees aren’t actually vegetarian. There are somewhere around 20,000 classified bee species, so there’s plenty of opportunity for diversity. While a handful of bee species are known to eat meat, such as vulture bees, most do eat flower related materials such as nectar, pollen, and flower oil. Some bees may gather these ingredients from a wide range of flower sources while other bees need specific plants for their meals. Bees have the most species diversity in arid regions, or places that are generally dry, but they’re found anywhere that flowers grow.

Most people understand bees as colony animals, but this is only one way out of many in which bees live. Most bees are actually varying levels of solitary. Unlike the honeybees we see building nests in trees, or even boxes, most bees build their nests underground. There are strictly solitary bees who gather their own food, lay their own eggs, provide for those eggs on their own, and leave them to fend for themselves. There are also some bees who will hang around and protect their young. Then there are bees who may form small groups which share a nest but then have individual branching egg chambers which the females provide for separately. Then again, there are other bees who form small groups and may divide labor between reproducers and food gatherers. Then of course there are eusocial bees like honey bees with different levels of working classes, but there are also socially parasitic bees in which an individual lady will take over a colony by killing the queen and then make the workers raise her offspring. A great example of this are bumblebees. There are other forms of parasitic bees, too, like ‘cuckoo’ bees who lay their eggs in the egg chambers of other bees meaning their young will grow while the original babies perish. Hopefully that very brief rundown has squashed any notions you had had that all bees are colony animals. At the end of the day, even if they aren’t the bees from which we humans gather honey, all bees are important to us because they help us make our food! So be sure to thank the bees you see, even the ones who don’t produce honey.

Like wasps, only female bees can sting. This is because a bee’s stinger is made up of the ovipositor, or the egg laying structure which males don’t have. Honey bees are only able to sting once as their stingers are barbed and become lodged in the flesh of a victim, but other bee species are able to sting multiple times. Bees undergo complete metamorphosis beginning life as eggs and then transitioning to the larva, pupa, and adult stages. Many bee species overwinter in their final larva stage. These bees may spend years underground waiting for the best conditions outside for reproducing. Other bees overwinter as adults and emerge in the spring to mate. Male bees are smaller than females and typically shorter lived, though a bee’s life span can be determined by factors such as season, their position in the colony, and more! Queen bees can live six years while workers may live three to six weeks in the summer to four months in the winter. In one season, in places where flowers are abundant and stick around for awhile, there can be multiple bee generations, but in colder areas there may just be a single brood. Generally, bees are known as fuzzy, black and yellow, striped, flying insects, however they come in many more shapes and colors! Some are entirely black, some are green, some have red bands, and some can even be electric blue!

For more facts on bees, check out the links in the description. Give a thumbs up if you learned something new today, and thank you for watching Animal Fact Files.