Man has probably collected sweet honey from bees for as long as he has existed. Fossil records show that bees first appeared on Earth at the same time as flowering plants, about 100 million years ago. In the process of visiting blossoms for pollen, honey bees pollinate plants and crops. Social bees have evolved a remarkable social system, headed by a single female, the queen bee. She is the only egg layer. Other females, called worker bees, forage for nectar, feed the queen and clean the hive. The workers also store honey and pollen, secrete wax (the building material of the hive) and rear the larvae. A queen, who can lay as many as 3,000 eggs per day, can live for eight years, while worker bees only last for about eight weeks. A worker bee flies up to a distance of eight miles from their hives. The only function of male bees, called drones, are to fertilize the queen. Bees are successful in a wide variety of environments ranging from tropical to cool temperatures because they can cool the nest by evaporation of water. Another interesting character of honeybees is their ability to communicate information about sources of food using movement or “dance”. Bees are responsible for the world’s supply of honey.