A bee can tell another bee where to go
A returning forager walks onto the comb and dances a figure of eight, waggling through the middle of it. The angle she waggles at, measured from straight up on the vertical comb, is the angle to fly relative to the sun. The length of time she waggles gives the distance — roughly a second per kilometre. Watching bees leave and measuring where they land confirms it works.
Karl von Frisch spent decades decoding this and shared a Nobel Prize for it in 1973; plenty of people refused to believe him. It is one of very few known cases of an animal telling another about something neither can currently see. Bees in a dark HIVE are being given directions to a FLOWER none of them has visited.
A queen is made, not born
Take a batch of ordinary female eggs. Raise most of the LARVA in the usual way and they become a WORKER — six weeks of life, sterile, worn out by flying. Keep feeding a few of them royal jelly and nothing else, and they become a QUEEN: larger, fertile, and alive for several years.
The genes are identical. Diet does all of it, switching whole blocks of genes on and off, and the colony decides which grubs get the treatment. If a queen dies unexpectedly they can start again on any young grub to hand — the closest thing in nature to promoting a randomly chosen infant to head of state.
Choosing a house by argument
When a COLONY splits, the SWARM hangs in a beard on a branch while a few hundred scouts go looking. Each scout that finds a cavity comes back and dances for it, and the better she rates it the longer she dances. Other scouts go and inspect the site themselves rather than taking her word for it.
Good sites recruit more inspectors, who dance too; poor ones fade out. Each scout also winds down her own advertising over time, so nothing wins by stubbornness. Once the number gathered at one site passes a threshold, the swarm lifts off. A colony makes a hard decision with nobody in charge, and usually picks the best cavity available.
A teaspoon of honey is a life's work
One WORKER produces about a twelfth of a teaspoon of HONEY in her lifetime. A jar is the complete output of hundreds of bees, and the foraging behind it adds up to a flown distance several times round the world — a few dozen milligrams of NECTAR at a time, carried to the NEST and fanned down into something that will not spoil for millennia.
The STING is the other famous fact, and it is costly: a honeybee's is barbed and tears loose, killing her. A BUMBLEBEE's is smooth and can be used repeatedly, though she almost never bothers. Bees sting to defend the COLONY and nothing else.
Most bees are nothing like this
There are around 20,000 species of bee, and the great majority live alone. No HIVE, no QUEEN, no WAX, no honey — a single female digs a hole, stocks it with POLLEN, lays an egg and leaves. Mining bees, mason bees and leafcutter bees are all doing this quietly in any GARDEN, unnoticed because they do not BUZZ about in a crowd.
They are also better at the job. Solitary bees carry pollen loose on their bodies instead of packed in neat baskets, so they POLLINATE more clumsily and far more effectively — a few hundred mason bees can outdo tens of thousands of honeybees in an orchard. The BEEKEEPER and the APIARY tend one domesticated species with STRIPES and busy WINGS; most of the work is done by bees nobody keeps.