An astonishing 25,000 or so species of bee have evolved to pollinate flowering plants. To put that in perspective, there are around 10,000 species of birds, and around 5,400 different mammals. Most people think a bee is plump, boldly striped with dense fur and a leisurely gait. But these are just bumblebees which account for only 1 per cent of bee species worldwide.  Others believe all bees make honey and live together with a queen bee, workers and male drones, but few bees do this.

The other thing all honey-makers have in common is a colony-wide social structure. All honey-makers are eusocial species, which means “truly social.” A eusocial nest contains one queen and many workers with a division of labor—different individuals doing different jobs. The colony also produces drones for reproductive purposes.

he roughly 20,000 species of bees we know about are divided into just seven families. Of those seven families, only one contains honey-making bees, the Apidae.

He concludes that what works well for bees can also work well for people: any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader's influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution.

Lastly, bees use the waggle dance. This is the most unique method of communication known to nature, or at least I think so. Using an intricate set of dance steps bees returning from foraging or hive site exploration describe to other bees in the hive the location and quality of these sites. The hive “votes” on the most viable site by the number of bees joining in the dance and the intensity of the dancing itself. In the case of selecting a new hive site, the bees will only relocate when a unanimous decision has been reached.

Secondly, bees use pheromones. Each hive has its own unique scent, which allows the bees to identify their family members. The queen produces her own pheromone, which inhibits the other females from laying eggs and draws her brood to her. Certain pheromones are also released if the bees sense danger.

Honey bee communication is about three primary methods they leverage. The first, and easiest to understand, is touch. Bees touch their antennae to identify each other and their feet to measure the size of comb cells.

But wait, this isn't totally accurate. There's a pretty secure reconstruction for a PIE word for "bee" in *bʰey-, with reflexes in Italic (e.g., Latin fucus = "drone"), Germanic (e.g., English "bee"), and a few other daughter branches (Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian).

As far as I can tell, it's confined to the Eastern branches of the Iranian subfamily. I'm not an expert on any Indo-Iranian language, but the reflex that seems clearest to a non-specialist (namely, me) is the Ossetian word for "[honey] bee", мыдыбындз (mydybyndz). The first half of that word, мыды- (mydy-), comes from PIE *médʰu "honey".

On the other hand there is a very well attested word for honey in every branch from Hittite (?) over Tocharian, Indoiranian and Celtic to Baltoslavic and germanic: Sanskrit madhu- 'honey', Mod. Eng. mead and so on, so why does the word for bee differ so much?Perhaps an interesting question, but hardly surprising. Here's a list:https://www.honeybeesuite.com/the-language-of-bee-and-honey/They mostly come from "hit", "bite" if it's not related to honey. Ie, bugs make honey. Not surprising.https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/b%D1%8C%C4%8DelaEdit: you can wiktionary around but apis pretty likely comes from ampi, from PIE imbe - swarm of bees (bi/biti/whatever), which brings us back to the initial point. Apis isn't unattested, and in fact fits nicely within pie, and otherwise an osco umbrian irregularity would otherwise make a lot of sense.

Humans are not the only animals to display collective intelligence. Bees are also well known for their ability to make accurate collective decisions when they search for foods or new nests. What’s more, bees can avoid maladaptive herding. Bees prevent bad information from becoming viral, although they copy each other through communication and social learning. But how do they do it? In the early 20th century, Austrian behavioral biologist Karl von Frisch found that worker honey bees use a kind of “waggle dance” for communicating with each other. In short, these waggle dances are bee versions of online shopping rating systems. Instead of stars or good reviews, bee ratings are based on the duration of the dance. When a bee finds a good source of food, it dances for a long time. When it finds a poor one, the duration of the dance is short or non-existent. The longer the dance, the more bees follow its suggestion to feed there. When honey bees find the best flowers, they go back to the hive and ‘tell’ the other bees how to get there. Researchers have demonstrated that bee colonies will switch their efforts to a more abundant site, even after foraging is already well underway elsewhere, thus preventing maladaptive herding. Collective flexibility is key.