Honey bees are important pollinators because they can be managed and easily moved to crop sites. They are biological indicators, meaning that their status is a reflection of the health of the general environment. If true, bee losses may be the beginning of a much larger environmental issue.

One of the major roles of honey bees is to gather propolis from trees and other vegetation and use it to seal cracks and crevices in the hive to make it less drafty when it is cold. And are essential pollinators: in 2000, the value of American crops pollinated by bees was estimated to be $14.6 billion.

Honey bees can sting, but are much less aggressive than wasps and hornets and have morphologically distinct castes: workers, male reproductive, and a queen. They are hardworking, useful insects that pollinate nearly one-third of all the food we eat, and make our life sweeter with the honey they produce. In a single day, a single hive can pollinate four million flowers, and make up to two pounds of honey.

They represent only a small fraction of the approximately 20,000 known species of bees. While some other types of related bees produce and store honey, honey bee's generalist floral visitors and pollinate a wide variety of plants.

They have complex dietary needs. If the temperature changes caused by global warming affect the landscape of a honey bee's territory, those changes may be harmful to honey bee health. These type of bee's prefer to nest in hollow cavities of trees, but man made structures are commonly selected as well.

Honey bees have been in decline for the last ten years, but the recent disappearances of honey bees due to colony collapse disorder have really caught the attention of the media and the public. All individuals within a colony, except the drones, survive the winter on stored honey. They live in colonies of 10,000 to 50,000 individuals, consisting of a queen, sterile female workers, male drones, and developing bees. Each colony builds a hive consisting of sheets of wax called comb.

Honey bees are among the most well-known and economically important insects. They produce honey and beeswax, and pollinate many crops. They have an unusual genetic sex determination system known as haplodiploidy, and worker bees are produced from fertilized eggs and have a full (double) set of chromosomes.

Lastly, honey bees are vegetarians, usually consuming only pollen and nectar from plant blooms or sweets like sugar syrup and honey dew. They are the chief insect pollinator for more than 90 crops in the United States and are vitally important to the farm economy of the nation and are also valued for the beeswax, honey, and other products they produce.