How Bees Help Us, a Bee Infographic on Hives and Pollination

Key points

• The graphic’s message is in its subtitle: honeybees do not only make honey, they help make the food humans eat, and they are in danger.
• A hive has one queen, tens of thousands of workers and a smaller number of male drones.
• The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that about one mouthful in three of our diet benefits directly or indirectly from honey bee pollination [2].
• Colony collapse disorder, named after heavy hive losses in the winter of 2006 to 2007, is when most worker bees disappear and leave the queen behind [3].

Text version of the bee infographic

The poster is titled How Bees Help Us, with the subtitle “Honeybees don’t just make honey… They help make the food that humans eat but they are currently in danger”. A large hive sits in the middle, with the queen, a worker and a drone labelled. Its sections read as follows.

How bees help us with food

Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma, which lets the plant set seed or fruit, as the graphic’s three flower drawings show. Bees are not the only pollinators. The first global assessment of pollinators, by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, counted more than 20,000 species of wild bees plus butterflies, flies, moths, wasps, beetles, birds and bats that pollinate plants [1].

The same assessment found that more than three quarters of the world’s food crops rely at least in part on pollination by insects and other animals, and that between US$235 billion and US$577 billion of annual global food production depends directly on pollinators [1]. In the United States, the Agricultural Research Service says about one mouthful in three benefits from honey bee pollination, and that almonds, other tree nuts, berries, fruits and vegetables depend on it [2].

The queen, workers and drones

A colony of western honey bees has a single fertile queen, many non-reproductive female workers and a small number of male drones [5]. At the height of the season a queen may lay over 2,500 eggs a day [5], although the Queen bee article gives about 1,500 a day for a well-fed queen in spring [6]. The average queen lives three to five years [5].

Worker lifespan depends on the season. In summer workers typically live two to six weeks, while workers in winter can live up to 20 weeks [7]. Drones do not gather food and their only role is to mate with a young queen; in areas with severe winters they are driven out of the hive in autumn [8]. The Queen bee article puts a full hive at 60,000 to 80,000 bees [6].

The graphic’s figure of 170 odorant receptors comes from the honey bee genome. Researchers annotated 170 odorant receptor genes in the honey bee, of which seven are pseudogenes, compared with 62 in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and 79 in the mosquito Anopheles gambiae [4].

Colony collapse disorder

The US Environmental Protection Agency describes colony collapse disorder as the loss of most of a colony’s worker bees, leaving behind the queen, plenty of food and a few nurse bees. Beekeepers began reporting unusually high losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives in the winter of 2006 to 2007 [3]. Researchers have focused on several factors: the varroa mite, new diseases such as Israeli acute paralysis virus and the parasite Nosema, pesticide poisoning, stress from transporting hives, changes in forage habitat and poor nutrition [3]. The EPA adds that reported cases of the disorder declined substantially in later years, although overall winter losses stayed high, averaging about 28.7 percent from 2006 to 2007 onwards [3].

Notes on this infographic

• Odorant receptors. 170 is the number of odorant receptor genes found in the honey bee genome, seven of them pseudogenes [4], not a count of receptors on one bee.
• 70% of crops. We could not find this figure in the sources we checked. The global assessment says more than three quarters of food crops rely at least partly on animal pollinators of all kinds, not bees alone [1].
• Since the 1990s. The EPA dates colony collapse disorder reports to the winter of 2006 to 2007 [3]. We could not confirm a decline starting in the 1990s.
• Queen and worker figures. Up to 2,500 eggs a day and up to five years match the sources [5]. Workers live two to six weeks in summer but up to 20 weeks in winter [7], so “5 to 6 weeks” covers summer bees only.
• Unchecked numbers. We could not verify 50,000 workers in summer and 5,000 in winter, 3,000 drones, 100 kg of honey a year per hive, or a 2 to 3 km nectar range. Treat them as the designer’s estimates.
• Wording. “Female part the flower” is missing a word, and “attracted to the colourful flowers that suck nectar from” is garbled. It means bees are drawn to colourful flowers and suck nectar from them.
• Credit. The poster has no logo, signature or source line, and we could not identify the creator.

Questions about bees

How do bees help us?

Mainly by pollinating crops. More than three quarters of the world’s food crops rely at least in part on animal pollination [1], and in the United States about one mouthful in three benefits from honey bee pollination [2]. Honey bees also make honey, which the graphic notes is their food store for winter.

Why are bees important to humans?

Pollinated crops provide fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts and oils, many of them important sources of vitamins and minerals. One of the assessment’s co-chairs said that without pollinators many people would no longer be able to enjoy coffee, chocolate and apples [1].

How can we help bees?

The graphic suggests planting more flowers and telling family and friends. Poor forage and loss of habitat are among the factors the EPA lists behind colony losses, so planting flowers addresses one of them directly [3].

Sources

1. FAO, Pollinators vital to our food supply under threat (IPBES assessment, 2016)
2. USDA Agricultural Research Service, Colony Collapse Disorder
3. US Environmental Protection Agency, Colony Collapse Disorder
4. Robertson and Wanner, The chemoreceptor superfamily in the honey bee, Genome Research, 2006 (PubMed)
5. Wikipedia, Western honey bee
6. Wikipedia, Queen bee
7. Wikipedia, Worker bee
8. Wikipedia, Drone (bee)

Last reviewed 29 October 2026