Honey Bee

A eusocial insect native to Europe, Africa and Asia and now kept and naturalized worldwide, living in colonies that can number tens of thousands of individuals organized around a single reproductive queen, female worker bees and, seasonally, male drones. Honey bees are the world's most economically significant managed pollinator, and their foraging behavior includes the waggle dance, a symbolic movement pattern that communicates the direction and distance of a food source to other workers in the hive, one of the most sophisticated forms of communication known outside vertebrates. Colony collapse disorder, a still only partly understood pattern of sudden, severe colony losses first widely reported in the mid-2000s, has drawn sustained research attention because of the species' outsized role in pollinating food crops.