Honey Bees

• Colonists brought European honey bees to North America in the 1600s for honey to preserve fruit, cure ham and make mead. Today, these highly social insects live in colonies around the world. Honey bees make honey from plant nectar and pollen. As they move from plant to plant, they help plants reproduce by pollinating (spreading pollen). In the United States, honey bees pollinate more than 100 crops. Honey bees sting only once because their barbed stingers come off when they pull away. According to the Pest World For Kids website, they make their familiar buzz by flapping their wings more than 11,000 times per minute.
  
  

Carpenter Bees

• Considered solitary bees, carpenter bees build a single-family nest where they live and care for their own family. While the male hovers outside, the female chews through soft woods to create a nest where she will lay her eggs. Chewed wood is used for building partitioned rooms or discarded outside the nest. Their burrowed tunnels can be 10 feet long. Though male carpenter bees do not have stingers, they will aggressively fly at intruders. Equipped with non-barbed stingers, females bees can sting repeatedly.
  
  

Africanized Honey Bees, a.k.a. Killer Bees

• In 1956 Brazilian scientists created the Africanized honey bee by breeding the European honey bee with the defensive African honey bee. They wanted a honey bee more suited to warm weather than the European but less defensive than the African. They were not entirely successful. Africanized bees thrive in warm weather but anger easily, defend their nests aggressively, attack in larger groups and pursue their victims farther than European honey bees. Since 1957, when 26 African queen bees escaped the breeding program, they have spread throughout South and Central America and into the southern United States.
  
  

Cuckoo Bees

• Cleptoparasitic bees, known as cuckoo bees, lack the physical structure to collect pollen and do not build their own nests. Instead, a female cuckoo bee waits for a pollen collecting bee to leave her nest, then the cuckoo bee will slip inside and lay her own eggs. Once hatched, the cuckoo larvae eat the pollen collected by the host bee and, if the female cuckoo has not already done so, the larvae will eat the hosts bees' eggs. According to Urban Bee Gardens, up to 15 percent of all bees are cuckoo bees.
  
  

Bumblebees

• The yellow and black coloring, stout bodies and bumbling flight path make bumblebees one of the most recognized insects in the world. Bumblebees live in colonies and in the spring return to the same area but always build a new nest. They prefer nesting in abandoned, underground bird or mouse nests but sometimes nest above ground. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that populations of four species of North American bumblebees "declined by up to 96 percent." Geographic ranges also declined according to the three-year study. The cause of the decline remains unclear.