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Honey Bees
- Important
pollinators of food crops -
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Summary: Honey bees create
highly complex, organized societies. Bees collect
pollen and plant nectar for food and in the process
cross pollinate the plants they visit. Excess plant
nectar is transformed into honey for long-term
storage.
Jack DeAngelis, PhD
OSU Ext. Entomologist (ret.)
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Honey bees are
familiar insects to most people. Bees live in
complex colonies run by a queen bee that organizes
colony behavior by passing chemical signals to
worker bees. Worker bees are all females, daughters
of the queen. Male bees, drones, are
occasionally produced in the colony only when needed
to mate with new queen bees.
Honey bee workers
collect pollen and plant nectar which is used for
food. Bees pollinate the plants they visit in order
to collect pollen and plant nectar is transformed
into honey for storage and is the colony's main food
reserve. Plant pollen serves as the colony's protein
food reserve.
Over many centuries we
have learned how to domesticate honey bees
so they work for us. For example, beekeepers move
colonies from place to place where agricultural
crops need bee pollination. We also harvest some of
the honey that bees produce.
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Honey bee
(Apis mellifera) - Note fine hairs
behind head. Yellow sac on hind leg is
collected pollen.
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Are honey bees
dangerous?
In general honey bees are
not dangerous. While some people are allergic to honey
bee venom, stings from honey bees are far less common
than wasp stings. With one exception, honey bees are
much less aggressive than yellowjackets, and other
social wasps, with which they are often confused.
One strain of honey bees,
however, does exhibit extreme aggression when
defending their hive. This strain was introduced into
South America from bees collected in Africa. The
aggressive strain is called Africanized honey bee.
Since the introduction of this bee, Africanized honey
bees have moved north and are now found throughout the
southwestern US (see What
are Africanized Bees?).
The study of honey bee
domestication and biology, called apiculture,
is a separate branch of entomology. The importance of
domesticated honey bees as pollinators has elevated
bees to this position. No other single insect has
been so intensively studied.
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Jack DeAngelis,
Ph.D.
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