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'
Honey bee that time. Few fossil deposits are known from South Asia, the suspected region of honey bee origin, and fewer still have been thoroughly studied. No "Apis" species existed in the New World during human times before the introduction of "A. mellifera" by Europeans. Only one fossil species is documented from the New World, "Apis nearctica", known from a single 14 million-year-old specimen from Nevada. The close relatives of modern honey bees – "e.g." bumblebees and stingless bees – are also social to some degree, and social behavior seems a plesiomorphic trait that predates the origin of the genus. Among the