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Painted wooden beehives with active honey bees A honeycomb created inside a wooden beehive. A beehive is an enclosed structure where some honey bee species of the subgenus Apis live and raise their young. Though the word beehive is used to describe the nest of any bee colony, scientific and professional literature distinguishes nest from hive.
Unlike a bumble bee colony or a paper wasp colony, the life of a honey bee colony is perennial. The three types of honey bees in a hive are: queens (egg-producers), workers (non-reproducing females), and drones (males whose main duty is to find and mate with a queen). Unlike the worker bees, drones do not sting.
Beekeeping (or apiculture) is the maintenance of bee colonies, commonly in artificial beehives. Honey bees in the genus Apis are the most commonly kept species but other honey producing bees such as Melipona stingless bees are also kept.
Census data shows that the number of bee colony operations rose much faster than honey production—and is up 160% since 2007. Pollination—not honey—is why the U.S. needs more bees.
There were 2.78 million colonies producing in 2016, an increase of 4% from 2015. North Dakota has the most honey producing colonies in the country, with 485,000 colonies that produced 37,830,000 pounds of honey in 2016. The average yield per colony in honey productions with more than five colonies was 58.3 pounds in 2016.
Unlike most other bee species, western honey bees have perennial colonies which persist year after year. Because of this high degree of sociality and permanence, western honey bee colonies can be considered superorganisms. This means that reproduction of the colony, rather than individual bees, is the biologically significant unit.