Other bees are either too few in number, or have too specialized food habits to be commercially valuable. Thus, honey bees provide about 80 percent of insect pollination service to crops. If it were not for them, yields from many of our crops would be uneconomical and quality would be substandard. The honey bee is unusually well adapted for pollination. Like other bees, their sense of smell, eyes, mouthparts, and numerous branched body hairs are ideally suited for finding food sources, sipping nectar, and collecting and distributing pollen.
Honey bees visit a wider variety of flower types than any other insect.
In a single day, one bee makes 12 or more trips from the hive, visiting several thousand flowers. Yet on each trip, it usually confines its visit to one plant species, collecting one kind of nectar and distributing one kind of pollen. It has a complex communication system that makes the colony efficient in finding and collecting food with maximum efficiency. All these characteristics enable the honey bee to find and distribute an abundance of pollen and make it our most valuable agent for cross-pollinating crops. Beekeepers maintain honey bee colonies in most agricultural areas, and are usually equipped to move colonies to any location where concentrated bee pollination activity is needed.