bee
Definition
A winged insect of the order Hymenoptera that collects pollen and nectar and produces honey
To remember it
Picture the cute, smiling bee in a flower pot. Remember that 'bee' means an insect with wings and fuzzy hair, like the one in this picture.
Examples
- A1
A bee flew into the kitchen and landed on the jar of honey on the counter.
- A1
Bees collect nectar from flowers and use it to make honey inside their hive.
- A2
She was stung by a bee while gardening and her hand swelled up immediately around the sting site.
- A2
The school organised a spelling bee in which students competed to correctly spell increasingly difficult words.
- B1
Honeybee colony collapse disorder — the phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive abruptly disappear, leaving behind the queen and food stores but causing the colony to fail — was first widely reported in the United States in 2006 and remains not fully explained, with contributing factors including pesticide exposure, varroa mite infestation, habitat loss, and nutritional deficiency creating a syndrome of vulnerabilities rather than a single identifiable cause.
- B1
Bees perform a remarkable navigational communication system — the waggle dance — in which a returning forager communicates the direction and distance of a food source to other bees in the hive by performing a figure-eight dance whose angle relative to vertical indicates direction (relative to the sun) and whose duration indicates distance, allowing the hive to direct other foragers to productive food sources without individual exploration.
- B2
The economic value of bees as pollinators — estimated at over $200 billion annually in global crop pollination services — dwarfs the value of honey production, making beekeeping financially significant not primarily as a honey business but as a component of agricultural production systems: almonds, apples, blueberries, and many other crops require insect pollination to set fruit, and commercial beekeepers move hives to orchards and farms to provide this service during flowering.
- B2
Bee venom therapy — apitherapy — the application of live bee stings or injected bee venom for therapeutic purposes — has been used in traditional medicine across many cultures for conditions including arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and neuropathic pain; the scientific evidence for its efficacy is limited and the risks (anaphylactic shock in sensitised individuals) are significant, placing it in the category of alternative therapies requiring careful clinical evaluation before recommendation.
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