Question: why is your favourite insect a bee??

Tom Dally answered on 10 Mar 2020: last edited 10 Mar 2020 12:09 am

Because bees are awesome! There are over 20,000 species of bee in the world. Some of these are social and live in colonies controlled by a queen, like honeybees and bumblebees, but most of them are solitary and live on their own in nests they build in rotting wood, or sandy soil, or stone walls. Bees are some of the most efficient insect pollinators in the world, and help pollinate a lot of the food that we eat. They also have some really cool behaviour, like how Orchid bees are one of the only animals in the world to mix perfumes to attract mates, or how cuckoo bumblebees will try to sneak into the nests of other bumblebees and kill the queen and take over her colony. Some of them also make honey, which I quite like on toast (although, fewer than 100 species out of 20,000 can actually make honey). They’re also kind of cute!