Honey Bee on a Flower Coloring Page for Kids to Print

Honey Bees and Their Busy Hive

A City of Thousands in One Hive

A honey bee is never alone for long. It belongs to a colony that can hold fifty thousand bees living together in one hive. Inside are three kinds of bee: one queen who lays all the eggs, thousands of female workers who do nearly every job, and some male drones whose main task is to mate with a queen.

The workers build the hive out of wax, forming perfect six-sided cells called honeycomb. Those neat hexagons store honey and pollen and hold the growing baby bees, and their shape uses the least wax to hold the most food, a natural feat of engineering.

From Flower Nectar to Golden Honey

Honey begins as nectar, the sweet liquid deep inside flowers. A worker bee sips it up with a long tongue, stores it in a special honey stomach, and carries it back to the hive, where other bees swallow and re-swallow it and fan it with their wings until it thickens into honey.

Bees make far more honey than they need so the whole colony can survive winter on the stored supply. A single worker bee makes only about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire life, so every jar is the work of many busy bees.

Talking with a Waggle Dance

Bees share directions by dancing. When a scout finds a good patch of flowers, she returns and performs a waggle dance, moving in a figure-eight and shaking her body to tell the others which way to fly and how far, using the sun as a compass.

Bees also see the world differently than we do. They can spot ultraviolet patterns on petals that guide them straight to the nectar, secret runway markings invisible to human eyes, like a hidden map painted on every flower.

Tiny Helpers the World Depends On

As a bee crawls over a bloom, dusty pollen sticks to its fuzzy body and rubs off on the next flower. This is pollination, and it lets plants grow seeds and fruit. About one in every three bites of food people eat depends on bees pollinating crops like apples, almonds, and berries.

Because bees matter so much, many people plant flowers, avoid harmful sprays, and keep backyard hives to help them thrive. The next time a bee hums past a garden, it is likely hard at work feeding both its hive and, in a small way, the whole world.

Many Kinds of Bees

Honey bees get the most attention, but they are only one of about twenty thousand kinds of bee. Fuzzy bumblebees are gentle giants that can fly in cooler weather, and their buzzing helps shake pollen loose from tomatoes and blueberries in a trick called buzz pollination that honey bees cannot do.

Most bees are not honey makers at all. Many are solitary, like mason bees and leafcutter bees that nest alone in hollow stems or small holes instead of a hive. These quiet workers are some of the finest pollinators of all, another reason gardeners leave a few bare patches and hollow twigs for them.