Like the wasps, most of the bees female they have functional sting. They present/display a straight sting and provided with small microscopic teeth so that, when they introduce it in his prey, it is anchored strongly to the body of his victim. When trying to remove it, the bee withdraws part of the abdomen and dies soon after. On the contrary which the wasps, however, depend on they polen like source of proteins and the nectar of the flowers like power plant. The adult females gather polen mainly to feed their larvae, although the adults also feed themselves on him and the nectar.

The body usually is very velludo; an adaptation to the harvesting of polen. Many bees have in the later legs groups of hairs that form a species of small basket with which they help the harvesting of polen that it is deposited in all the body. Other bees transport polen in a group of hairs located in the inferior part of the abdomen. They polen that inevitably they lose when going of flower in flower is important for the plants because leaves from him falls on the pistilos of other flowers of the same species, producing a crossed polinización. The bees are the main polinizadores insects.

A great majority of the species of bees is solitary: each female makes its own nest and stores provisions for its larvae. Some bees, however, are communal. They are like the solitary bees, but several females pertaining to the same generation share he himself nest, constructing each one their own cells to lodge eggs, larvae and pupas. A few types of bees are semisocial: they live in small colonies, of two to seven members of the same generation, formed by a queen, or main ponedora, and by several workers.

Probably they are 1,000 or plus the species of bees that live in small colonies formed by a queen and a few daughters workers, between that the chaste ones are almost indiscernibles. These species form provisional colonies that usually disintegrate themselves in autumn; only the queen survives the winter. The bumblebees are a familiar example. The eusociales bees (“really social”) live in great colonies formed by females of two generations: the mothers (queens) and the daughters (workers); the males do not play role some in the organization of the colony, but they are important to fertilize eggs.

The primitive bees, like the wasps from which they arose, are solitary species. Each female constructs to its own nest and its cells, and full each one of these with a mass of polen dampened with nectar or oil. When in a cell there are foods sufficient to feed the larva until it reaches the adult phase, the female puts an egg in its interior and soon it seals before constructing it a new cell.

The communal bees make similar nests and cells, but in its case, each nest (by a tunnel excavated in the ground) is occupied by several bees. The semisocial bees and the most primitive eusociales also make nests and cells like those of their solitary relatives, but the construction and supplying of these are, often, a joint task.