Western honey bee and Africa", making conservation of wild-bee diversity important. They further argue that the difficulty of controlling drones for mating is a serious handicap and a sign that domestication is not complete, in particular as "extensive gene flow usually occurs between wild/feral and managed honeybee populations". The honey bee is a colonial insect which is housed, transported by and sometimes fed by beekeepers. Honey bees do not survive and reproduce individually, but as part of the colony (a superorganism). Honey bees collect flower nectar and convert it to honey, which is stored in the hive. The nectar, transported in the bees'
Western honey bee at best partial. Oldroyd observes that the lack of full domestication is somewhat surprising, given that people have kept bees for at least 7000 years. Instead, bee-keepers have found ways to manage bees using hives, while the bees remain "largely unchanged from their wild cousins". Leslie Bailey and B. V. Ball, in their book "Honey Bee Pathology", call honey bees "feral insects", in contrast to the silkworm ("Bombyx mori") which they call "the only insect that has been domesticated", and refer to the "popular belief among many biologists as well as beekeepers that bees are domesticated". They argue that honey