Honey Bees can be as large as 5/8 inches long and are red-brown and black with pale, orange/yellow rings. With two pairs of rings, worker bees have a stinger that will be used when their colony is threatened. Honey Bees are social creatures and will create hives in trees and those kept by beekeepers, as well as passing food to one another, mixing it with their saliva to create chemical bonds.

Honey Bees feed on nectar and honey, pollinating the very plants they feed on, as well as producing the honey they eat. The queen Honey Bee intermittently produces eggs, resulting in colonies of 60,000 to 80,000 members. The life span of Honey Bees is 2 to 3 years for queens, while drones will die after mating.

Halt Bugology Factoid
There are only seven recognized species of honey bee with a total of 44 subspecies (Engel, 1999) though historically, anywhere from six to eleven species have been recognized. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the approximately 20,000 known species of bees. (Factoid Source: wikipedia)

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