Bees are incredible insects that have evidently defined roles. Between twenty thousand and sixty thousand bees live in a lone hive with the queen bee as the head of the family. In fact the queen bee lays 1500 eggs a day and lives for almost two years. The next in the chain of command is the drone who is basically lazy - his sole job being to mate with the queen bee. Drones live for around 24 days, have no stingers and do nothing at all. The labor is left to the worker bee in the hive those who fly around collecting pollen and nectar.

Worker bee can fly up to 14kms to find food, working up speeds of around 24kms per hour. Once a worker bee finds flowers from where it can collect nectar it makes a dance - the direction of the bee's movements and the frequency of its vibrations indicate the direction and distance of the flowers. But this excited doings takes its toll and most worker bees die within 40 days. Apart from collecting nectar and insertion it in the honeycomb cells, the worker bees evaporate any water from it by rapid wing movements. When the amount of water content is fewer than 18 per cent, the mixture is called honey. The cells are now scaled and the hive is ready to be defended by the worker army.

Bee keeping varieties of Apis are general floral visitors, and will pollinate a large type of plants, but by no means all plants. Of all the honey bee groups, only Apis mellifera has been used widely for commercial pollination of crops and other vegetations. The worth of these pollination services is generally measured in the billions of dollars.

There are two kinds of honey bees are often maintained, (1. A. mellifera and 2. A. cerana,) nourished, and transported by beekeepers. Present day hives also allow beekeepers to transfer bees, moving from one field to another field as the crop wants pollinating and permitting the beekeeper to charge for the pollination works they give, revising the chronological role of the self employed beekeeper, and supporting large scale profitable operations.

Bees of the family Apidae - which includes honey bees - store honey and pollen, and rear the brood, in vertical combs with a layer of cells on each face. Of the four species of honey bees in this family, three occur only in Asia. Apis dorsata, the giant Indian bee, which build a single comb as large as 1.5m (5ft) wide and 1m (3ft) long attached to rocks, trees, or buildings. A.florea, with a single comb about 8 to 12 cm (3 to 5 inch) across, and A.indica-the oriental hive bee, with nests of several combs are sheltered in crevices of rocks or hollows of trees. Unlike the other bees, these honeybees do not hide away during the cold weather. They last out the rigors of northern cold winters by nourishing on saved supplies and sharing their body heat, gathering together in dense packs.

Socialization is most advanced in the family of Apidae. As new, young queens are about to emerge in an established hive, half of the colony leaves with old queen and clusters on a nearby bush or tree while scout bees search for a new home. When the scouts appear to agree on a new place, the swarm disappears. At the old nest, mean while, the first queen to emerge disposes of the other queen (by stinging them) before they have a chance to emerge. Within a few days, the virgin queen will take off to where drones gather, and mate with 6 to 12 drones. The sperm from these drones is stored in a sac (spermatheca) and used during her egg - laying life of from 2 to 5 years or maximum of 9.

Drones develop by parthenogenesis from unfertilized eggs that the queen makes by withholding sperm from the eggs laid in large drone cells. Drones lack stings and the structures needed for pollen collection, in the autumn they are expelled by the colony to starve, unless the colony is queen less. New drones are created in the spring for mating.

Both queens and workers are created from fertilized eggs. Queen larvae are reared in special peanut-shaped cells and fed more of the pharyngeal-gland secretions of the nurse bees (milk or royal jelly) than the workers larvae are. The precise mechanism for this caste separation is still uncertain. Although workers are parallel in appearance and performance to other female bees, they lack the structures for mating. When no queen is there to inhibit the development of their ovaries, however, workers ultimately begin to lay eggs that develop into drones.

The uprightness of the colony is maintained by chemical secretions, or PHEROMONES. Workers secrete pheromones from the nasal gland at the tip of the abdomen when they cluster, enter a new nesting site, or make a source of nectar or water. The colony scent is recognizable by bees of the same colony because of its exclusive mixture of components derived from the colony's particular collections of nectar and pollen.

When queen fly to mate, a mandibular - gland pheromone attracts the drones. The same gland produces another pheromone, called queen substance, which workers lick from the queen's body and pass along as they exchange food with each other. The eaten pheromone prevents the ovaries of workers. When the queen's secretion is insufficient, the colony manufactures queen cells to supersede her. The mandibular glands of workers produce an alarm odor, which serves to warn the colony when it is disturbed. Workers also generate a sting odor, which is released at the site of the sting and serves to guide other bees to the sting area. Stingless bees bite leaves at intervals along their flight path to provide a scent trial of mandibular secretions.

The ability of honey bees to communicate direction and distance from the hive to nectar sources through ‘dance language' has received wide spread attention. In 1973, Kari Von Frigch received a Nobel Prize for deciphering the language, which consists of two basic dances: a dance in circle, for indicating sources without reference to specific distance or direction; and a tail wagging dance, in which the exact distance is indicated by a number of straight runs with abdominal wagging- the fewer runs per minute, the farther away the source. Wing vibrations make sounds at the same rate as the tail wagging and are identified by organs in the legs of other bees. Researchers have developed a robot ‘bee' that can correspond with other bees in this way. The direction, or azimuth, to the food resource is denoted by the angle of the wagging dance to the sun. Bees utilize the sun as a compass, adjusting the dance angle to the plane of polarization of the sunlight. Even when the sun is covered by clouds, bees can spot the position of the sun from the polarized light emanating from brighter patches of sky. Honey bee also has a built in clock that appears to be harmonized with the store of nectar in flowers. Hence, honey bees making the rounds of flowers in exploration of nectar always seem to be at the right place at the right time.