Eusocial

Definition

A eusocial colony has individuals that reproduce and individuals that do not but help raise the offspring of those that do. Honey bees, bumblebees and stingless bees are eusocial; the great majority of bee species are not. It is worth knowing that eusociality is the exception among bees rather than the rule — the familiar image of bees is drawn from a small minority of them.

Bee records that discuss this

• Western honey beeThe bee behind essentially all the world's honey, and the one most people mean when they say 'bee'. Apis mellifera is a perennial eusocial insect that overwinters as a living cluster rather than dying back each year — which is the whole reason it stores honey in quantity, and therefore the reason it was ever domesticated. It is native to Europe, Africa and western Asia and has been carried by people to every continent except Antarctica.
• Stingless beesThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.
• Small carpenter beesTiny, shiny, metallic dark-green or blue-black bees that excavate nests in the soft pith of broken stems — bramble, raspberry, elder, sumac — and then, unusually for a solitary bee, stay with their offspring. A Ceratina mother guards her nest through development and in some species is still alive when her young emerge, which puts the genus at one of the evolutionary staging posts between solitary living and true sociality.
• Metallic green sweat beeBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.
• Sharp-collared furrow beeA small sweat bee that is one of the best-studied examples of primitive eusociality anywhere. A single foundress produces a first brood of small workers who forage for her, and only later are reproductive females produced — a genuine caste system without the sharp physical separation honey bees show, and one that switches on and off with latitude.
• Robber stingless beesThe stingless bees that gather no food of their own. Lestrimelitta have lost the pollen-carrying apparatus entirely and live by raiding other meliponine nests — a whole genus of eusocial bees that has abandoned foraging, and the clearest possible demonstration that being a stingless bee does not mean producing honey worth harvesting.

Guide records that discuss this

• Stingless bees vs honey beesBoth are eusocial, both store honey, both have queens and workers — and they have been evolving apart for something like eighty million years. Almost everything else differs.