Bee Facts

Buzzing facts about bees — the tiny insects running one of nature's most impressive operations.

Bees are among the most ecologically important insects on Earth, responsible for pollinating roughly one-third of the food crops consumed by humans. The approximately 20,000 known bee species range from the familiar European honeybee (Apis mellifera) to solitary ground-nesting species that most people never notice. Honeybee colonies exhibit collective intelligence that has attracted serious attention from computer scientists modelling distributed decision-making: when scouting for a new nest site, scout bees perform waggle dances whose duration is proportional to site quality, and the colony reaches consensus through a process that resembles quorum sensing in bacteria.