When the hive is threatened, honeybees will swarm out and attack with their stingers to drive the enemy away. Honeybees, like most insects, look at the world through compound eyes . These are made of hundreds of small simple eyes called ommatidia . The images received by all the ommatidia are put together in the insect's brain to give it a very different way of seeing the world. To see the world the way a bee does, check out Andrew Giger's B-Eye web site in the links section.
Honeybees are social insects .
In the wild, they create elaborate nests called hives containing up to 20,000 individuals during the summer months. They work together in a highly structured social order. Each bee belongs to one of three specialized groups called castes . There is only one queen in a hive and her main purpose in life is to make more bees. She can lay over 1,500 eggs per day and will live two to eight years.