Have you ever thought about the honeybee? Maybe not. We usually don't spend much time thinking about insects. Beetles? So what. Grasshoppers? Big deal. Flies? They are a pain, but who really cares?

If we ever do think about insects, it's normally because they bug us. That's why we call them bugs. Mosquitoes suck our blood and spread diseases in the process. Termites eat our houses. Ants are persistently pesky. And don’t even get us started on cockroaches – gross!

But honeybees are different. They are fascinating! First, honeybees make millions of pounds of honey every year. Second, honeybees pollinate crops for us. If it weren't for honeybees and their pollinating abilities, we would not get to eat oranges, apples, peaches, strawberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers or almonds… along with many other fruits and vegetables. Third, honeybees are cool. Everything about them (except maybe the stinger) is cool. They are organized, clean, efficient, productive little insects that do a lot of good.

What Happens in a Beehive?
A beehive is an unbelievable place. Many insects live solitary lives, but a beehive is like a small city. A typical hive has about 50,000 bees living inside. And each of those 50,000 bees has a job to do.

A hive has one queen. She is in charge of laying eggs, and she can lay up to 2,000 a day. Those eggs take about 21 days to turn into adults. The eggs first turn into larvae, which look like tiny worms. They grow for nine days eating royal jelly and beebread (a mixture of honey and pollen). Then they turn into pupae before morphing into an adult.

All of this egg laying and pupating is happening in the lower part of the hive, which is called the brood chamber. If the queen is laying 1,000 eggs a day, there are 21,000 honeycomb cells in the hive that contain baby bees. Nurse bees take care of all of these babies, feeding them, keeping them the right temperature, capping their cells when they pupate and cleaning out the cells when they emerge.

Meanwhile, many worker bees in the hive take care of things at home. They are fixing the hive, fanning their wings to keep air moving, creating new honeycomb to store honey, etc. Guard bees protect the entrance of the hive. The bees in a hive all have a certain smell. If bees from a different hive try to get in, the guards smell the difference and repel the intruders.

Other worker bees are out in the fields gathering nectar and pollen and bringing it back to the hive. When a scout bee finds a new crop of flowers filled with nectar, it will fly back to the hive and do a special dance to tell other bees about it. Not only does the dance tell the other bees what direction to fly to find the flowers, it also tells them how far away the flowers are.

The honey gets stored in the upper part of the hive. A strong hive can create a hundred pounds of honey or more in a single year. A beekeeper – also known as an apiarist – is a person who harvests honey to sell. When a beekeeper harvests the honey, he will leave behind enough for the bees to make it through the winter.

A hive contains two other types of bees that create new hives. When it is time for a community of bees to reproduce, it will create new queen bees and drones. A new queen mates with the drones and then flies back to the hive. She gathers thousands of workers, and they fly away in a swarm to create a new hive.

Doing the Bee Bop When the food is far away, the scout performs a waggle dance. During the waggle dance, the scout runs in a straight line while waggling her abdomen, and then returns to the starting point by running in a curve to the left or right of the line. The straight line indicates the direction of the food in relation to the sun. If the scout runs straight up the hive wall, then the worker bees can find the food by flying toward the sun. If she runs straight down the wall, then the worker bees can find the food by flying away from the sun.