ggs compared to other insects, with a single female often laying less than 50 eggs before she dies. Male bees do not live long beyond mating, they do not collect pollen and have little value as pollinators.
While most of these wood-nesting and ground-nesting bees are solitary, some are gregarious, preferring to nest near others, a behavior that allows large aggregations to develop in favorable locations. Only a few tunnel and ground-nesting bee species ever develop truly social colonies, and often such behavior is environmentally dependent with some bees being social in one situation and being solitary in another. The one group of strictly social bees native to the United States is the group of approximately 45 bumble bee species.
The two habitat components need to be close enough together so that the bees can fly between them. The flight distance of a bee varies with the size of the bee. Small sweat bees and mining bees may not fly more than 200 or 300 yards from nest to forage area. Large bees (bumble bees, for example) can cross a mile or more of inhospitable, flower-less landscape to forage. But however large the bee, if it has to fly too far the effort begins to outweigh the benefits and the bee may either find somewhere else to nest or not survive in the landscape.
A third factor that influences habitat is insecticide exposure. To thrive, bees need minimal exposure to pesticides.
The Apidae are a large family of bees, comprising the common honey bees, stingless bees (which are also cultured for honey), carpenter bees, orchid bees, cuckoo bees, bumblebees, and various other less well-known groups. The family Apidae presently includes all the genera that were previously classified in the families Anthophoridae and Ctenoplectridae, and most of these are solitary species, though a few are also cleptoparasites. The four groups that were subfamilies in the old family Apidae are presently ranked as tribes within the subfamily Apinae. This trend has been taken to its extreme in a few recent classifications that place all the existing bee families together under the name "Apidae" (or, alternatively, the non-Linnaean clade "Anthophila"), but this is not a widely-accepted practice.
Stingless Bees. These can be found in most tropical or subtropical regions of the world, such as Australia, Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America and parts of Mexico and Brazil. The majority of native social bees of Central and South America are stingless bees, although only a few of them produce honey on a scale such that they are farmed by humans. They are also quite diverse in Africa and are farmed there also; meliponine honey is prized as a medicine in many African communities.
Being tropical, stingless bees are active all year round, although they are less active in cooler weather. Unlike other eusocial bees, they do not sting but will defend by biting if their nest is disturbed. In addition, a few have mandibular secretions that cause painful blisters. Despite their lack of a sting, stingless bees, being social, may have very large colonies made formidable by way of numerous defenders.
Stingless bees usually nest in hollow trunks, tree branches, underground cavities, or rock crevices but they have also been encountered in wall cavities, old rubbish bins, water meters, and storage drums. Many beekeepers keep the bees in their original log hive or transfer them to a wooden box, as this makes it easier to control the hive.
The bees store pollen and honey in large egg-shaped pots made of beeswax, typically mixed with various types of plant resin (sometimes called "propolis"). These pots are often arranged around a central set of horizontal brood combs, where the larval bees are raised. When the young worker bees emerge from their cells, they tend to remain inside the hive (much like honey bees, performing different jobs. As workers age, they become guards or foragers. Unlike the larvae of honey bees, stingless bee larvae are not fed directly by worker adults. The pollen and nectar are placed in a cell, an egg is laid, and the cell is sealed unt