What Is a Group of Bees Called?

A group of bees can be called several things depending on what they are doing.  Words include: grist, flight, colony, nest, swarm, and hive.  Let’s look at these words and learn more about bees.  

The specific answer to what a group of bees is called will vary depending on the situation:

• When humans have provided a home for a group of bees, it is called a hive. 
• Grist, colony, and nest refer to a group of bees as well.  There can also be colonies of ants, badgers, bats, beavers, frogs, gulls, penguins, rabbits, rats, and weasels or nests of fish, insects, pheasants, rabbits, snakes, toads, and turtles.
• Flight and swarm refer to a group of flying bees. Butterflies, duck, geese, swans, pigeons, and other birds are also often referred to as a flight. Further, swarm, in addition to referring to bees, can also refer to ants, eels, insects, minnows, and rats.  

What Are Bees

Bees are flying insects that are related to ants and wasps. 

• They are important as pollinators and produce honey and beeswax. 
• They fill their need for protein from pollen and their need for energy from flower oils or nectar.
• Bees have soft body hairs that help them collect pollen.  Of course some of the pollen will fall off while the bee is flying and that serves a very important function of cross-pollination. 
• Bees are the most important pollinating insects and mutualism is the name of this symbiosis between bees and plants. The bees get food and the plants get pollinated. 
• Besides their body hair to collect pollen, and bees have a complex tongue that allows them to feed on nectar. 
• Female bees mainly collect pollen to feed to their larvae.    
• There are 20,000 species of bees in the world and many have not been either named or studied.  The only places they are not found are in arctic regions, very high altitudes, and on some islands.

Facts About Bees

The size of bees ranges from two mm to 4 cm, or 0.08 in to 1.6 in. The smallest bee is the Trigona minima, or dwarf bee, and the largest bee is Megachile pluto, a leaf cutter bee.

Bees come in many colors.  Some are red, bright yellow, blue, or green, while some are just gray or black.

Bees are classified as social, solitary, and parasitic.

• The 400 or so species of social bees are divided into honeybees and bumblebees.  In the social bee community, several females may share a nest.  The mothers are the queens, the daughters are workers, and the males are there for fertilization. 

• Solitary bees are primitive bees.  The female makes a burrow and provides enough pollen to sustain the bee after hatches until it is full size.  She lays an egg, seals the cell, and moves on to repeat the process.
• Parasitic bees are also called cuckoo bees and they do not make nests or forage for food.  They steal nests and food from other bees.  Some lay eggs in the cells of solitary bees and others will go into as colony and kill the queen and enslave the workers.

The most common type of bee in the northern hemisphere is the sweat bee.  Because they are so small, they are many times thought to be flies or wasps.

The honey bee is the most well-known bee.  It is loved because of the honey it produces and people who manage honey bees are called beekeepers or apiculturists. 

Some natural predators of bees are: dragonflies, beewolves, mockingbirds, bee-eater birds, kingbirds, varroa mites, frogs, toads, titmice, and martins. 

So, now you know the various names for a group of bees as well as some other key details about bees in our world.