Kingdom Of Bees
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A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect within the genus Apis of the bee clade, all native to mainland Afro-Eurasia.[1][2] After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current cosmopolitan distribution of honey bees, introducing multiple subspecies into South America (early 16th century), North America (early 17th century), and Australia (early 19th century).[1]
Honey bees are known for their construction of perennial colonial nests from wax, the large size of their colonies, and surplus production and storage of honey, distinguishing their hives as a prized foraging target of many animals, including honey badgers, bears and human hunter-gatherers. Only eight surviving species of honey bee are recognized, with a total of 43 subspecies, though historically 7 to 11 species are recognized. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees.
The best known honey bee is the western honey bee, (Apis mellifera), which was domesticated for honey production and crop pollination. The only other domesticated bee is the eastern honey bee (Apis cerana), which occurs in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees,[3] but some other types of bees produce and store honey, and have been kept by humans for that purpose, including the stingless bees belonging to the genus Melipona and the Indian stingless or dammar bee Tetragonula iridipennis. Modern humans also use beeswax in making candles, soap, lip balms and various cosmetics, as a lubricant and in mould-making using the lost wax process.
Honey bees appear to have their center of origin in South and Southeast Asia (including the Philippines), as all the extant species except Apis mellifera are native to that region. Notably, living representatives of the earliest lineages to diverge (Apis florea and Apis andreniformis) have their center of origin there.[2]
The first Apis bees appear in the fossil record at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary (34 mya), in European deposits. The origin of these prehistoric honey bees does not necessarily indicate Europe as the place of origin of the genus, only that the bees were present in Europe by that time. Few fossil deposits are known from South Asia, the suspected region of honey bee origin, and fewer still have been thoroughly studied.
While about 20,000 species of bees exist,[11] only eight species of honey bee are recognized, with a total of 43 subspecies, although historically seven to 11 species are recognized:[12] Apis andreniformis (the black dwarf honey bee); Apis cerana (the eastern honey bee); Apis dorsata (the giant honey bee); Apis florea (the red dwarf honey bee); Apis koschevnikovi (Koschevnikov's honey bee); Apis laboriosa (the Himalayan giant honey bee); Apis mellifera (the western honey bee); and Apis nigrocincta (the Philippine honey bee).[13]
Honey bees are the only extant members of the tribe Apini. Today's honey bees constitute three clades: Micrapis (the dwarf honey bees), Megapis (the giant honey bee), and Apis (the western honey bee and its close relatives).[12][14]
Most species have historically been cultured or at least exploited for honey and beeswax by humans indigenous to their native ranges. Only two species have been truly domesticated: Apis mellifera and Apis cerana. A. mellifera has been cultivated at least since the time of the building of the Egyptian pyramids, and only that species has been moved extensively beyond its native range.[15]
Apis florea and Apis andreniformis are small honey bees of southern and southeastern Asia. They make very small, exposed nests in trees and shrubs. Their stings are often incapable of penetrating human skin, so the hive and swarms can be handled with minimal protection. They occur largely sympatrically, though they are very distinct evolutionarily and are probably the result of allopatric speciation, their distribution later converging.
Given that A. florea is more widely distributed and A. andreniformis is considerably more aggressive, honey is, if at all, usually harvested from the former only. They are the most ancient extant lineage of honey bees, maybe diverging in the Bartonian (some 40 million years ago or slightly later) from the other lineages, but do not seem to have diverged from each other a long time before the Neogene.[14] Apis florea have smaller wing spans than its sister species.[16] Apis florea are also completely yellow with the exception of the scutellum of workers, which is black.[16]
A. mellifera phylogeny is the most enigmatic of all honey bee species. It seems to have diverged from its eastern relatives only during the Late Miocene. This would fit the hypothesis that the ancestral stock of cave-nesting honey bees was separated into the western group of East Africa and the eastern group of tropical Asia by desertification in the Middle East and adjacent regions, which caused declines of food plants and trees that provided nest sites, eventually causing gene flow to cease.[24]
Apis mellifera is not native to the Americas, so it was not present when the European explorers and colonists arrived. However, other native bee species were kept and traded by indigenous peoples.[25] In 1622, European colonists brought the German honey bee (A. m. mellifera) to the Americas first, followed later by the Italian honey bee (A. m. ligustica) and others. Many of the crops that depend on western honey bees for pollination have also been imported since colonial times. Escaped swarms (known as \"wild\" honey bees, but actually feral) spread rapidly as far as the Great Plains, usually preceding the colonists. Honey bees did not naturally cross the Rocky Mountains; they were transported by the Mormon pioneers to Utah in the late 1840s, and by ship to California in the early 1850s.[26]
Africanized honey bees (known colloquially as \"killer bees\") are hybrids between European stock and the East African lowland subspecies A. m. scutellata; they are often more aggressive than European honey bees and do not create as much of a honey surplus, but are more resistant to disease and are better foragers.[27] Accidentally released from quarantine in Brazil, they have spread to North America and constitute a pest in some regions. However, these strains do not overwinter well, so they are not often found in the colder, more northern parts of North America. The original breeding experiment for which the East African lowland honey bees were brought to Brazil in the first place has continued (though not as originally intended). Novel hybrid strains of domestic and re-domesticated Africanized honey bees combine high resilience to tropical conditions and good yields. They are popular among beekeepers in Brazil.[citation needed]
As in a few other types of eusocial bees, a colony generally contains one queen bee, a female; seasonally up to a few thousand drone bees, or males;[29] and tens of thousands of female worker bees. Details vary among the different species of honey bees, but common features include:
Of all the honey bee species, only A. mellifera has been used extensively for commercial pollination of fruit and vegetable crops. The scale of these pollination services is commonly measured in the billions of dollars, credited with adding about 9% to the value of crops across the world. However, despite contributing substantially to crop pollination, there is debate about the potential spillover to natural landscapes and competition between managed honey bees and many of the 20,000 species of wild pollinators.[33]
Species of Apis are generalist floral visitors, and pollinate many species of flowering plants, but because of their \"generalized\" nature, they often do so inefficiently. Without specialized adaptations for specific flowers, their ability to reach pollen and nectar is often limited. This combined with their behavioural flexibility may be why they are the most commonly documented pollen thieves.[34] Indeed, for plant species with more specialized pollinators, experiments show that increased honeybee visitation can actually reduce pollination, both where honey bees are non-native[35] and even where they are native.[36] What's more, their tendency to visit all species in a given area means that the pollen they carry for any one species is often very diluted. As such, they can provide some pollination to many plants, but most plants have some native pollinator that is more effective at pollinating that species.[37] When honey bees are present as an invasive species in an area, they compete for flowers with native pollinators, which can actually push out the native species.[38]
Western honey bees are often described as essential to human food production, leading to claims that without their pollination humanity would starve or die out.[39][40] Apples, blueberries and cherries, for example, are 90 percent dependent on honeybee pollination.[41] Albert Einstein is sometimes misquoted as saying \"If bees disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live\".[42] Einstein did not say this and there is no science to support this prediction.[43]
No crops originating in the New World depend on the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) at all, as the bee is an invasive species brought over with colonists in the last few centuries.[citation needed] Tomatoes, peppers, squash, and all other New World crops evolved with native pollinators such as squash bees, bumble bees and other native bees.[citation needed] The stingless bees mentioned by Jefferson[clarification needed] are distant relatives of the honey bees, in the genus Melipona.[citation needed] 781b155fdc
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