Honey bees coordinate their activities through a sophisticated blend of pheromones and movement. Queen Mandibular Pheromone (QMP) helps maintain colony cohesion, while alarm pheromone is released when bees sting and rallies other bees to defend the hive. Nasonov pheromone is released by workers to mark the hive entrance or to help swarm clusters settle in a new location. In addition to chemical signals, bees perform symbolic dances on the comb. The waggle dance, famously decoded by Karl von Frisch, who received a Nobel Prize in 1973 for the work, encodes the direction and distance of a food source, while the round dance is used for sources less than about 50 meters from the hive.
Foraging itself is a demanding job. Bees commonly forage 2 to 3 miles from the hive and can range out to 5 miles or more when needed. On a single trip, a forager visits 50 to 100 flowers, and a productive worker can complete 10 to 20 such trips in a day. Bees collect nectar, the sugary liquid flowers produce, and pollen, the plant's reproductive cells and the colony's main protein source. Older workers also gather water and propolis, a resin from tree buds used to seal and sanitize the hive.
Nectar becomes honey through a deliberate process. Bees repeatedly regurgitate the nectar, enzymatically transforming its sugars, and evaporate water from it until the finished product is around 17 to 18 percent water. This low water content, combined with honey's natural acidity, prevents microbial growth and explains why honey does not spoil. Beeswax, the material of comb construction, is secreted by glands on worker abdomens at body temperatures of roughly \(33-36°C\) (\(91-97°F\)). Bees build honeycomb in hexagonal cells because the geometry maximizes storage volume while minimizing the wax required, an elegant mathematical efficiency. The wax cap and brood cells differ in their purpose: brood comb raises young, while honey comb stores the colony's food reserves.