the.com/honeybee
a tiny aviator who votes by dancing and dies for the family business.
means A small social bee of the genus Apis, kept by humans for the honey and beeswax it produces and famous for pollinating crops and flowers.
from A plain English compound of "honey" and "bee," both ancient Germanic words. "Honey" traces back to Old English "hunig," with cousins across the Germanic languages (German "Honig"), and "bee" comes from Old English "beo." The pairing is almost redundantly cozy — bees were the only honey-makers anyone knew — but the compound stuck to mark the domesticated hive insect apart from its many stinging relatives.
- waggle dance
- Figure-eight wiggle encodes flower distance and direction
- lifetime output
- One worker makes a twelfth-teaspoon of honey
- democracy
- Swarms pick new homes by dance-off consensus
- fatal sting
- Barbed stinger rips free, killing the bee
- wingbeat
- Around 230 flaps per second power flight
apis mellifera — the western honeybee species, responsible for ~90% of global pollination and kept by 81+ million beekeepers worldwide
varroa destructor mite — parasitic mite that devastated honeybee colonies starting in the 1980s, now the leading cause of hive collapse
colony collapse disorder — mysterious phenomenon causing 30-50% of honeybee colonies to disappear each winter since 2006 in north america