There are now bees on every continent except Antarctica, but that was not always true. The temperature in Antarctica is so extreme that bees cannot survive, and the habitat can't sustain many flowering plants to serve as their food supply. In fact there are only two flowering plants on the southernmost continent, Antarctic pearlwort and Antarctic hair grass; the flowers of both plants largely remain closed and self-pollinate.
There were no honey bees in the New World prior to human European colonization, although the climate was hospitable to them. European honey bees were introduced by colonists into North America soon after they arrived. In New England, the English immigrant William Blackstone reportedly was unsuccessful in his efforts to grow apple trees until honey bees were brought over in 1623 to provide pollination. Colonists in Australia and New Zealand also imported honey bees from Europe to pollinate their crops and to provide honey and wax.
No, in fact most bees do not make honey. Of the approximately twenty-five thousand known species of bees, only seven species with forty-four subspecies are recognized as honey bees that produce and store honey. There are some other related bees that also produce and store small amounts of honey, but only members of the genus Apis are considered true honey bees.
In Europe and America, the most common type of honey bee managed by beekeepers is the Western, or European, bee, which has many subspecies, or regional varieties, including the European dark bee, the Italian bee, the Carniolan honey bee, and the African bee. There are other species of tropical honey bees in Asia, including the red dwarf honey bee, the Eastern hive bee, and the common giant honey bee. Subspecies differ in color, anatomy, and behavior, depending on the habitat to which they have adapted.
A honey bee colony is a large social group made up almost totally of females, traditionally described as being like a factory within a fortress, efficiently guarded and run by sterile females in the service of their queen. Recent developments in molecular research have made it possible to rapidly and easily obtain a genetic profile of the members of a colony, and scientists using these new techniques indicate that the traditional concepts may be oversimplified.
For example, Madeleine Beekman and Ben Oldroyd at the University of Sydney studied one particular subspecies of A. mellifera, and for that population they estimated that from 10 to 50 percent of workers from other colonies were successful in sneaking past the guards of another colony and entering the hive, with the intention of parasitizing the colony's resources and possibly even laying eggs that could be fed and cared for unwittingly by the hive bees that attend the queen's eggs.
So the answer to this question is more complex than was true in the past - there are probably more types of bees within one hive than anyone would have imagined, and we will discuss the new data as we describe life in the colony. But the basics remain the same: a honey bee colony typically consists of as many as fifty to seventy-five thousand bees, and all or most of them are the female offspring of one queen. There are a few hundred drones and one queen, unless the queen is not functioning normally and a transition to a new queen is in progress.
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