Most bees don't migrate, but species of honey bees that are native to Southeast Asia migrate long distances to avoid the stressful environmental conditions associated with the monsoon season. The giant honey bee, Apis dorsata (a sister species to the western or European honey bee Apis mellifera), is native to Thailand and India; these bees regularly abandon their nests and move into areas that have better food resources during the time of year when their normal food sources disappear, and they come back when the dry weather returns. A. dorsata colonies resemble the vertical combs of A. mellifera, but they differ in that they do not nest inside a cavity. Instead, they build exposed beeswax combs that are at risk for being damaged or destroyed by the rains.
Many bees involuntarily migrate when roving beekeepers in the United States load up a tractor-trailer filled with honey bee colonies and transport them across the country to be temporarily located near flowering crops that require insect pollination in order to develop fruit. Moving hundreds of colonies across the country - from Florida (for oranges), to South Carolina (for melons), to New York (for apples), to Maine (for blueberries), to California (for almonds) - these migrating pollinators have become an industry that supports commercial agriculture.
Scout bees regularly look for food around their hives, and they typically travel within a four- to five-mile radius. Most foragers concentrate on food sources that are within about two miles from their nest, depending on the availability of local flowers, but when hives are located far from food sources, bees can fly longer distances. In a classic series of experiments to study how far bees can fly, honey bees are trained to feed from artificial flowers laced with a sugar solution. When the feeders are gradually moved away from the hive with feeding bees on them, observations by Karl von Frisch and his many students indicate that bees can travel up to twelve miles from the nest to obtain food.
The real answer to this question is not so much limited by the bees' flight ability, but rather by their reason for flying high. Bees can and do fly to the height of the tallest trees in order to reach flowers; in rainforests, there are trees that are two hundred feet tall, which would not be a problem for hungry bees. Bees can also be seen visiting flowers on window boxes on tall apartment buildings without any sign of physiological stress. The real limit to bee flight is temperature, which declines at high altitudes, and they cannot fly when temperatures are below about 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius).
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