Portal:Agriculture/Selected article/2

A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect from the genus Apis of the largest bee family, Apidae. All honey bees are nectarivorous pollinators native to mainland Afro-Eurasia, but human migrations and colonizations to the New World since the Age of Discovery have been responsible for the introduction of multiple subspecies into South America (early 16th century), North America (early 17th century) and Australia (early 19th century), resulting in the current cosmopolitan distribution of honey bees in all continents except Antarctica.

Honey bees are known for their construction of perennial hexagonally celled nests made of secreted wax (i.e. beehives), their large colony sizes, and their routine regurgitation of digested carbohydrates as surplus food storage in the form of honey, the lattermost of which distinguishes their hives as a prized foraging target of many mellivorous animals including honey badgers, bears and human hunter-gatherers. Only 8 extant species of honey bees are recognized, with a total of 43 subspecies, though historically 7 to 11 species are recognized. Although honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees, they are the bee clade most familiar to the humans and are also the most valuable beneficial insects to agriculture and horticulture. (Full article...) (Full article...)