Why do bees collect honey?

Bees harvest honey because honey and pollen are food. It is mainly consumed by the queen bee and worker bees, which secrete royal jelly from glands in their heads. This is used to feed the larvae and so on.

Introduction of honey bees:

Honey bees (Bee/Honey bee) belong to Hymenoptera, Honey bee family. The body is 8-20 millimeters long, yellowish brown or blackish brown, bearing dense hairs. The head is almost as wide as the thorax. The antennae are geniculate, the compound eyes are oval and hairy, the mouthparts are chewing and sucking, and the hind feet are pollen-carrying. Two pairs of membranous wings: forewings large, hindwings small, fore and hindwings interlocked by wing hooks. The abdomen is nearly oval, with fewer body hairs than the thorax, and there are chelicerae at the end of the abdomen. It passes through four insect states in its life: egg, larva, pupa and adult.

Species Development:

The first genus (Apis) and the first species (Apis mellifera L.) of honey bees were first recorded by Linnaeus C. in 1758.

By 1980, due to the extent of specimen collection at that time, the limitations of research on bee biology, and the lack of evidence for some new species of bees, there were only four recognized species of honey bees in the world at that time, namely, the large honey bee (Apis dorsata Fabricius), the small honey bee (Apis florea Fabricius), the oriental honey bee ( Apis cerana Linnaeus) and the western honey bee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus).

In 1985, Chinese scholars conducted a multidisciplinary comparative study of six species of bees harvested from Yunnan in morphology, biology, ecology, entomological geography, cytogenetics, and molecular biochemistry, and determined that the black large honey bee (Apis laboriosa Smith) and the black small honey bee (Apis andreniformis Smith) are separate bee species and determined their taxonomic status.

In 1988, foreign scholars established Apis indica-koschevnikovi, described and named by Buttel-Reepen in 1903, as a separate bee species, Apis koschevnikovi Buttel-Reepen. Thus, seven species of bees were established in the world.