Amazing animals – native bees with Dr Elise Oakman

Facts number one, a bee is an insect with four wings, two on each side, and a bee has hairs on its body for collecting pollen.

Like all insects, a bee has three main body parts, a head, a thorax, and an abdomen.

Bees mostly eat pollen and nectar from plants, and bees carry pollen from flower to flower, which helps new plants to grow.

Many bees have a painful sting, and it's only the females that can sting.

Wasps have a lot in common with bees, like having a painful sting, but wasps aren't hairy like bees, and they usually have a very thin section in the middle of their body.

Fact number two.

Bees are important pollinators that help new plants to grow.

Flowering plants make pollen, which is a very fine powder that can stick to the hairs on a bee's body.

When a bee transfers pollen from one flower to another, the pollen can fertilise the second flower, leading to the flower making seeds that can grow into new plants.

Bees pollinate wild flowering plants and are also very important for fertilising food crops, like fruits and vegetables, as well as seed crops that are used to make vegetable oil.

Fact number three, there are 2,000 different types of native bees in Australia.

When we think of bees, we often think of European honeybees, with their yellow and black striped bodies buzzing around flowers, living in hives and making delicious honey that we might eat on buttery toast.

But European honeybees have only been in Australia for about 200 years.

Honeybees first travelled here in beehives that were brought to Australia on sailing ships.

But long before that time, native bees were buzzing around Australia and pollinating plants for millions of years.

Facts number four.

Most bees don't make honey.

European honeybees are used by people to pollinate crops and to make most of the honey you can buy in shops.

Some bees make honey as a way of storing food for their colony and for feeding bee larvae.

The life cycle of a bee includes four stages.

The first stage is the egg, then a little grub called a larva, then a pupa, and then the adult bee.

A honeybee larva needs to eat honey to grow into a pupa.

Of the 2,000 native Australian bee species, only 11 species are known to make honey, and only bees living in warm places make more honey than they need to feed their colony.

If people were to take too much honey from these native bees, their colonies would not survive.

Facts number five.