Honeybees are superorganisms . Honeybees are hive minds . Honeybees are linguistic networks : One of the few nonhuman animals to communicate symbolically , they dance to explain the location of food to their fellows . Bee people use such metaphors but admit they don ’ t quite capture these complex , fascinating creatures and their ultra-organized communities . With a population of up to 80,000 , a beehive is like a small human city .
Bumbling and buzzing , these industrious animals — Apis mellifera , as scientists call them — search flowers for tiny drops of a sugary secretion called nectar . Bees slurp the nectar into their “ honey stomachs ,” which break down the sugars . Inside the hive they regurgitate the goop and fan it with their wings to evaporate the water . The sweet , gluey result — honey — is stored for winter food or stolen by humans . A pound of clover honey , ecologist Bernd Heinrich has estimated , “ represents the food rewards from approximately 8.7 million flowers .”