Is a bee an animal?

The short answer is yes, bees are both insects and animals. In fact, all insects are animals, and pretty much anything that's not a plant, fungus, bacterium, virus, or protist is an animal too. ... That leaves plant or animal. read more

According to the book, ‘The Buzz about Bees, Biology of a Superorganism’ by Jurgen Tautz, Johannes Mehring (1815-1878) declared that a bee colony is a single “being” equivalent to a vertebrate animal. read more

The earliest animal-pollinated flowers were shallow, cup-shaped blooms pollinated by insects such as beetles, so the syndrome of insect pollination was well established before the first appearance of bees. read more

The honey bee is a herbivorous animal and therefore lives purely on the nutrients from plants. Honey bees prefer to ingest the sweeter plant produce such as nectar, pollen, fruits and even honey. Due to their small size, honey bees have a number of predators in their natural environment. read more

When the cuckoo bee larva hatches it consumes the host larva's pollen ball, and often the host egg also. The Arctic bee species, Bombus hyperboreus, in particular are an aggressive species that attack and enslave other bees of the same subgenus. However, unlike many other bee brood parasites, they have pollen baskets and often collect pollen. read more