This family consists of the honey bees, stingless bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees, cuckoo bees, bumblebees, and others. In all there are about 30,000 species, they all eat pollen and nectar and feed their larvae on the same diet.
The genus Bombus contains the commonly named Bumblebees. These are social insects that construct their nests underground, or in the case of the Carder bees in leaf litter beneath hedges.
The genus Nomada contains over 850 species and is one of the largest of the Apidae genera. These bees are wasp like with yellow and black, or brown and black markings. Most of them are Kleptoparasites and are known as cuckoo bees, due to laying their eggs in the nests of other species.
