Are all bees honey bees?
Short answerFalse
No, and it is not close. There are around 20,000 bee species worldwide and only about eight are honey bees. Roughly 90% are solitary — one female, one nest, no colony, no queen and no honey at all. Bumblebees make a few days' worth of stores in wax pots; stingless bees make a genuinely harvestable quantity. Everyone else makes none.
The scale of it
- Around 20,000 described bee species in seven families.
- Around eight to eleven honey bees, in the genus Apis.
- About 250 bumblebee species and about 500 stingless bees.
- Britain has around 270 bee species; the United States around 4,000. In each case exactly one is the honey bee.
A solitary bee's whole life is: emerge, mate, find or dig a nest, provision each cell with pollen and nectar, lay one egg per cell, seal it, die — usually before the offspring emerge. There is no colony to feed through winter, so there is nothing to store.
Why it matters practically
The other bees are also doing work honey bees cannot. Buzz pollination unlocks tomatoes and blueberries and honey bees cannot do it at all. Long-tongued bumblebees reach flowers honey bees cannot. Mason bees pollinate orchards several times more effectively per individual, because they carry pollen dry and shed it readily.
Sources
- The Bees of the World — Johns Hopkins University Press (2007) · Textbook
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
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