Billy Joe Fowler, age 10, of Charleston, W. Virginia, for his question:

How many kinds of bees are there?

Billions of bees buzz around among the flowers, but they are not all alike. Honeybees are not stingless bees and wild bees are not tame bees. Each different kind is called a species    and there are more bee species than you might expect. To count them all, you would have to roam through the tropics and way up to Greenland. Besides, many are hard to find because they live solitary lives in secret hideaways.

Almost every year, entomologists find a new bee to add to their list. So far, they have found about 10,000 different species    and more are expected. All of them have bee shaped bodies, though some are larger than others. They cannot eat meat because their rather weak mandible haws cannot handle tough food. However, they all have special long tongues to probe down the throats of the flowers. They live on sweet nectar and golden pollen, which they make into honey.

However, each bee species has at least one feature that makes it different from all other bees. Some species live in large family colonies and share a very busy life in a hyv^_, Lwt nost bees live solitary lives. In these species, the queen mother does her own housework. She usually lays her eggs in a small secret burrow, adds a store of food for the babies and seals up the nursery. She may share a burrow with several sister queens, but each one has a separate nursery. Hundreds of solitary bees may nest in a small grassy patch near an orchard.

Several honeybee species live happily in man made hives. The big bumblebees build their own nests and live in the wild. When summer ends, all of them die except the young queens. They hibernate and start new hives in the spring. When winter comes, the ra: e honeybees hide in their hives and live on stored honey.

Certain solitary bees live very interesting lives. About 350 species are called carpenter bees because they chisel their nests into solid wood. Mason bees nest in stones or in deserted snail shells. The many miner bees dig tunnels in the ground. The various leaf cutter species snip neat circles from the greenery and stuff them into their burrows.

Almost all bees use hairy fringes on their back legs and pollen baskets. But the cuckoo bees have no pollen baskets, so they cannot gather food for their babies. Some lay their eggs in the nests of other bees. Some raid a bumblebee hive, kill the queen and make the workers tend their eggs. Later the young cuckoos fly away.

All bees have stingers. But the so called stingless bees never use them as weapons. When scared, they prefer to bite. Maybe we would get stingless hive bees if we crossed them with our honeybees. However, this is not likely because the two types have different habits. They could never agree on how to build their combs, store the food or feed the growing children.