The honey bee is hardly at risk of extinction. There are more honey bees on the planet today than at any time in history. Scientific American, Alison McAfee, a honey bee researcher at North Carolina State University, notes: “For some reason, maybe because they are small, honey bees are not generally viewed as the massively distributed livestock animal that they are.”

North America’s native bees, on the other hand, are in trouble—and these insects bear little resemblance to the familiar honey bee. Unlike honey bees, more than 90 percent of our nearly 4,000 native bee species live not with other bees in hives but alone in nests carved into soil, wood or hollow plant stems. Often mistaken for flies, the majority are tiny and do not have queens or produce honey.

Honey gets its color from the nectar that a hive gathers to make it. Because plants blossom at different times of year and bees collect nearly year-round, a single hive can produce radically different colors of honey from season to season.

Honey is a super-saturated solution of primarily two sugars: glucose and fructose. Just like with your powdered lemonade, it is a natural process for some of the sugars in a super-saturated solution to eventually come out of solution. All raw honey will crystallize due to glucose

Colonists brought honey bees from Europe to North America beginning in the 1620s as a source of wax and sugar. With the advent of modern agriculture in the 1930s—when huge farms displaced habitats that housed crop-fertilizing native pollinators someone had the idea that you can box up honey bees and move them around the country to pollinate crops.