So you think you know everything you need to know about honeybees?

FLORIDA WEEKLY FILE PHOTO We all know what a honeybee is — or do we?

"Honeybee" is the common name for several species of social bees that make honey. They have six legs, four wings and compound eyes. Most are yellow and black, and some have striped abdomens. They're cold-blooded and regulate their body temperature by huddling together or by beating their wings up to 180 beats per second.

As many as 60,000 honeybees live together in one hive. You might come across wild nests in manmade structures or, as Winnie-the-Pooh did, in hollow trees.

Urban bees gather pollen from flowering trees, and perhaps from your garden. Beekeepers build wooden hives and sometimes keep them in urban areas.

Fossil records prove honeybees have existed for millions of years. They originated in Africa and Europe. European colonists brought them to North America, and the bees now populate South America as well. In fact, they're naturalized in all continents except Antarctica.

Honeybees are often confused with wasps such as hornets and yellow jackets, but wasps live in paper-like nests or in holes in the ground. Honeybees build hives out of wax they shape into hexagonal clusters. These clusters are storage areas for pollen and honey and are where the queen lays eggs.

LEE BELANGER / FLORIDA WEEKLY There are three types of honeybees: workers, queens and drones. All the work is done by worker bees, which are infertile females. You'll see them flying with pollen stuck to their hind legs. Workers make up the largest number of bees in a colony, often numbering more than 50,000. They clean and guard the hive, feed larvae, circulate air with their wings, gather pollen and nectar, and make wax from their abdomens.

When a worker bee finds a good flower source, she marks the spot with a chemical scent called a "pheromone." She then flies back to the hive and "dances." The dance tells other workers how far and what direction to fly to find the flowers. The scent directs workers the rest of the way.

The queen is the only bee that lays eggs. She stays in the hive, leaving only to mate, and eats up to 80 times her body weight to produce 2,000 eggs a day. Eggs develop into larvae within three days. Larvae feed almost continuously and then rest in a pupae stage. Adults emerge 16-26 days later.

Usually a honeybee hive supports just one queen at a time. When the queen dies, workers secrete royal jelly from salivary glands and feed it to a few young worker larvae. These larvae develop into new queens.

The males, called drones, mate in the air with queens from other colonies. A colony has up to 500 drones at one time. Queens live up to eight years, and workers live through the winter; drones die soon after mating.

Unlike ants and wasps, honeybees are vegetarian. The get protein from pollen, and carbohydrates from the honey they make from nectar. Bees in one hive can make two pounds of honey a day. This means trips to 100,000 flowers. In the winter, mature bees live on the stored honey.

So how do bees gather nectar from flowers? They suck it up with their tongues. As they drink the nectar, it goes into their crop for storage. At the same time, plant pollen sticks to the hairs on their body and legs. When the bee flies to another flower, some pollen rubs off on the new flower. This pollinates the flower so new seeds can grow.

So pollination helps the plants, and pollen provides food for the bees. This mutual relationship is called symbiosis.

Bees are not the only source of pollination, however. They cannot see the color red, so bats, the wind, birds or butterflies must pollinate red flowers.

Bees are certainly industrious. They don't even sleep. We enjoy their honey and the fruits and flowers they pollinate, if not their stings. But are they ever a real threat? Next week I'll write about swarms and whether bees can pose any real danger to humans.