The Honey Bee is also known as the ‘hive bee’ and can be seen in gardens, meadows, orchards and woodlands where there are plenty of flowers. It lives in a bee hive which can have as many as four thousand bees. In a bee hive there is usually one queen bee, lots of female workers and also drones which are stingless male bees.

The Honey Bee is just over a centimetre in length and its body is divided into three distinct parts: the head, the thorax and the abdomen. It has a black head and its abdomen is black with white stripes. The thorax, which is the middle part of the body, is covered in short orange coloured hairs and it holds three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings. The Honey Bee has a very tiny ‘waist’ between the thorax and the abdomen. It also has two long antennae on the front of its head and two large black eyes.

The bee hives of Honey Bees are made up of lots of wax ‘honeycombs’. Each honeycomb has small cells to store food and to bring up their young in. Honey Bees make lots of honey in their bee hives which is made from pollen and nectar. Wild bee hives can occasionally be found in hollow trees or dead trees in woodlands, but most bee hives are domesticated and controlled by bee keepers.