What is the difference between a honey bee and a bumble bee?

I notice that the bumble bee seems to work alone and not part of a community hive. Do they have hives ? or are they loners in the bee world. What are there purpose and habits.What is the difference between a honey bee and a bumble bee?
The Honey bee is a single species of insect (Apis mellifera).


http://www.entomology.ucr.edu/ebeling/eb鈥?/a>





Bumblebees are related to honey bees - both belong to the same family (Apidae). However ';bumblebee'; is a generic term referring to all bees in the genus Bombus. There are about 250 different types of bumblebees worldwide.


http://www.entomology.ucr.edu/ebeling/eb鈥?/a>


http://www.kendall-bioresearch.co.uk/bum鈥?/a>What is the difference between a honey bee and a bumble bee?
...To begin with lets take a look at a bumble bee and her distant cousin the honey bee, with whom she is most often confused. Unlike the honey bee the humble bumble is gentle and slow. As she trundles around the garden collecting pollen and nectar she is quite different to her streamlined relative who dashes about everywhere. Even her body shape is different. The bumble is round and furry and not at all like her more wasp shaped cousin. In fact there are three kinds of bumble bees, the large Queen, the smaller imperfectly formed female worker bee and the tiny male or drone bee. All are seen at different times of year. Only the Queen and the worker bees have a sting.





About where they live...


Bumblebees form colonies. However, their colonies are usually much smaller than those of honey bees, because of the small physical size of the nest cavity, the fact that a single female is responsible for the construction, and the restriction to a single season (in most species). Often, mature bumblebee nests will hold fewer than 50 individuals, and may be within tunnels in the ground made by other animals, or in tussock grass.


Bumblebees mostly do not preserve their nests through the winter. The queens can live up to one year, possibly longer in tropical species.