Honey bees are vegetarians. They eat only nectar (a source of sugars or carbohydrates) and pollen (a source of proteins). The bees manage their nutrition by constantly sharing food. Radio-labelled sugar syrup fed to a single worker bee quickly shows up in the rest of the population. Protein is also managed by a colony. When pollen is in short supply, developing larvae may be eaten in an effort to conserve this proteinaceous resource. Dr. Clarence Collison provides a good summary of nutritional needs in this 20 minute video presented at the Northern Virginia Beekeeping Association (NVBA), published January 17, 2016.
Honey bee colonies need water and its management should not be ignored. Even though nectar is mostly water, the colony’s need of moisture is rarely entirely satisfied in this manner. This is an area that requires much more study.
Finally, all plants are not necessarily beneficial to honey bees. Several well-known examples of poisonous ones exist. These occur in specific locations. Usually beekeepers in the immediate area are familiar with them.
1 T.S.K. and M.P. Johansson, “Feeding Sugar to Bees,” Some Important Operations in Bee Management, International Bee Research Association, 1978.
An enduring fascination with the honey bee concerns how individual worker bees find food sources and then communicate these locations to nest mates. The so-called “dance language,” pioneered by Karl von Frisch, has a great deal going for it. So much so that robots are now being programmed based on this idea at Georgia Tech University documented in this 7-minute video:
Actually, honey bees are probably in better shape nutritionally than other bees. Although beset by the many of the same problems as honey bees, there is no human constituency looking after the thousands of species of other bees on the planet.