1) Honeybees are fuzzy, 2) yellow and black, 3) ruled by a monarch, 4) have really cool tongues (that we haven't talked about yet), 5) like blue, purple and yellow flowers that are flat, and 6) make sweet, golden syrup called honey 7) are VITAL to agriculture in North Carolina because of their pollination powers.
So just like humans are unique in that we have less hair than other members of the Hominidae family and are the only ones that utilize our tongues/vocal chords (resulting in speech), honeybees are unique to the Hymenoptera order. Where as we have less hair, honeybees are the opposite and have a very fuzzy thorax. That is totally different than anything else in the Hymenoptera family which includes, wasps and ants; they are fuzz-less.
Honeybees are also like us in that they use their mouths differently from everyone else. Wasps and ants use their mandibles for eating. Honeybees use theirs for moving pollen around to their back legs where they have pollen baskets, and honeybees also have an additional something: a tongue or proboscis to drink nectar and water.
Honeybees and ants, like everyone else in their family, have antennae, but use theirs slightly different. Ants are included in this feature because, like the honeybee who lives in a dark hive, ants live in dark tunnels, and the way that these highly social insects communicate is through pheremones.
Pheremones are emmited for a number of reasons like for signaling alarm, attack, mating, foraging and the ultimate Queen pheremone that keeps worker bees from laying eggs. That we'll get to in "some sweet Social Culture of the Honeybee."
These pheremones are detected and decoded by their antennae that decipher smell (pheremones), touch and taste.
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