Graham Workman looks at bumblebees and honeybees in this week’s Nature Notes column.

There are roughly 100 million managed western honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies in hives worldwide, with about half in Europe, Africa and western Asia, where the species is native, and the rest in ...

Honey bees pollinate one in three bites of food we eat. Honey bees are highly social creatures that live in large family groups. Each group or colony is well-organized, with three types of adult bees: ...

A beehive operates more like a democracy than a monarchy. In fact, US bee researcher Thomas D. Seeley describes a colony’s social structure as a ‘bee democracy’, where many decisions are made ...

Several hundred bees in rural Pennsylvania and rural New York are sporting tiny QR codes on their backs. More than the latest in apiarian fashion, the little tags serve a scientific purpose: tracking ...