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The animals on the cover of Building Microservices are honey bees (of the genus Apis). Of 20,000 known species of bees, only seven are considered honey bees. They are distinct because they produce and store honey, as well as building hives from wax. Beekeeping to collect honey has been a human pursuit for thousands of years.

Honey bees live in hives with thousands of individuals and have a very organized social structure. There are three castes: queen, drone, and worker. Each hive has one queen, who remains fertile for 3–5 years after her mating flight, and lays up to 2,000 eggs per day. Drones are male bees who mate with the queen (and die in the act because of their barbed sex organs). Worker bees are sterile females who fill many roles during their lifetime, such as nursemaid, construction worker, grocer, guard, undertaker, and forager. Foraging worker bees communicate with one another by “dancing” in particular patterns to share information about nearby resources.

All three castes of honey bee are similar in appearance, with wings, six legs, and a body segmented into a head, thorax, and abdomen. They have short fuzzy hairs in a striped yellow and black pattern. Their diet is made up exclusively of honey, which is created by a process of partially digesting and regurgitating sugar-rich flower nectar.

Bees are crucial to agriculture, as they pollinate crops and other flowering plants while they collect pollen and nectar. On average, each hive of bees gathers 66 pounds of pollen a year. In recent years, the decline of many bee species has been cause for concern and is known as “colony collapse disorder.” It is still unclear what is causing this die-off: some theories include parasites, insecticide use, or disease, but no effective preventative measures have been found to date.

Many of the animals on O’Reilly covers are endangered; all of them are important to the world. To learn more about how you can help, go to animals.oreilly.com.

The cover image is from Johnson’s Natural History. The cover fonts are URW Typewriter and Guardian Sans. The text font is Adobe Minion Pro; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is Dalton Maag’s Ubuntu Mono.