Everything you wanted to know about the world's most important pollinators.
A healthy honeybee colony can contain 20,000 to 80,000 bees, with a single queen, thousands of worker bees, and hundreds of drones.
Honeybees are responsible for pollinating roughly one-third of the food we eat, making them essential to agriculture and biodiversity.
A single worker bee produces only about 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. It takes about 2 million flower visits to make one pound of honey.
Bees communicate the location of flowers through a "waggle dance" — a figure-eight movement that conveys direction and distance.
Worker bees live about 6 weeks during summer. The queen can live 3–5 years and may lay up to 2,000 eggs per day at peak season.
Texas is home to over 800 native bee species. Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native but are the most commonly managed species for honey and pollination.