The animals on the cover of Building Microservices, Second Edition, are honeybees (of the genus Apis). Of the more than 20,000 species of bees, there are only eight species of honeybees. These social-nesting bees are unique in how they collectively produce and store honey, as well as build hives from wax. Beekeeping to collect honey has been a human pursuit around the world for thousands of years.
Honeybee hives contain thousands of individuals and have a very organized social structure comprising a queen, drones, and workers. Each hive has one queen, which remains fertile for 3–5 years after her mating flight and lays up to 2,000 eggs per day. Drones are male bees that mate with the queen (and die in the act because of their barbed sex organs). Worker bees are sterile females that fill many roles during their lifetime, such as nursemaid, construction worker, grocer, guard, undertaker, and forager. Pollen-laden worker bees returning to the hive “dance” in set patterns to communicate information about nearby food.
Though queens are a bit larger, honeybees are otherwise similar in appearance, with transparent 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. The adults’ diet is made up exclusively of honey, which is created by a process of partially digesting and then regurgitating sugar-rich flower nectar.
Bees are crucial to agriculture; as they collect their food, they pollinate crops. Commercial bee hives are transported by beekeepers to where crops need to be pollinated. On average, each hive of bees gathers 66 pounds of pollen a year. In recent years, however, colony collapse disorder, brought about by a variety of diseases and other stressors, has caused an alarming decline among honeybee species.
Honeybees are vulnerable to the same pesticides and introduced parasites and diseases that have driven down numbers of wild bees and other pollinators, but honeybees do have some human support and protection because they are key in agriculture. Many of the animals on O’Reilly covers are endangered; all of them are important to the world.
The cover color illustration is by Karen Montgomery, based on a black and white engraving from The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature. The cover fonts are Gilroy 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.