Western honey bee

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus named the species Apis mellifera in 1758. Apis is Latin for bee, and mellifera means honey-bearing. English speakers also call it the European honey bee, and the common name is written both as one word and two. It belongs to the family Apidae, which also holds the bumblebees, and to the order Hymenoptera with the ants and wasps.

As the species spread it adapted to local climates, and 31 subspecies are now recognised. They fall into four branches: African, north-western European, south-western European and Middle Eastern. A. m. mellifera, the dark bee of northern Europe, was long thought to interbreed freely with the rest. In 2013 researchers found that its queens do not mate with drones of other subspecies. The African subspecies A. m. scutellata, released by accident in South America, became the so-called killer bee.

Evolution and relatives

The genus Apis holds six other species, among them the Asian honey bee, the giant honey bee and the dwarf honey bee. All six arose in southern and south-eastern Asia. Only the western honey bee is thought to have arisen in Europe, Asia and Africa together. Its genome suggests an origin in Africa, followed by two ancient spreads into Europe.

The genome was fully sequenced in October 2006, making the honey bee the third insect mapped after the fruit fly and the mosquito. Females carry 32 chromosomes and males only 16, because a drone grows from an unfertilised egg. Genes for smell far outnumber genes for taste. The bee's body-clock genes look more like those of vertebrates than those of other insects. The waggle dance is more precise than the dance of the dwarf honey bee, so it seems to have improved since the two lines split.

Appearance

The body is red-brown to golden, banded in black, with rings of orange-yellow on the abdomen. Hair covers the thorax, and the abdomen carries less. The legs are dark brown or black, and each hind leg carries a pollen basket, a fringe of stiff hairs that holds a pollen load. The colour and banding differ between subspecies, some darker and some more mixed.

There are three castes, and the field ranges from 1 to 2 centimetres across them. A worker is 10 to 15 millimetres long, a drone 15 to 17, and a queen 18 to 20. The queen has a longer, rounder abdomen, and the drone has much larger eyes for spotting a flying queen. Workers are smaller than drones, yet their wings are longer.

Queens and workers carry a sting formed from the egg-laying tube. The worker's sting is barbed and tears out of her body when it lodges in skin, so she dies. The queen's sting has no barb, and drones have no sting at all. The barbs only catch in elastic material, so a bee can sting another insect and fly off unharmed.

Habitat and range

The species arose in Africa or Asia and spread on its own through Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Europeans shipped colonies to North America in 1622, and settlers carried them to South America, Australia, New Zealand and East Asia. The bees spread ahead of the settlers, and Native Americans called them the white man's fly. GBIF holds records from 227 countries and territories, more than for almost any other animal.

Honey bees do best where flowers are plentiful: meadows, open woodland and gardens. They can live in grassland, desert and wetland if there is water, food and shelter. A wild colony needs a cavity, usually a hollow tree, and seals every gap but one with propolis. Workers forage within about 3 kilometres of the hive and can fly 8 to 13 km for food or water.

The bee needs a body temperature of 35 degrees Celsius to fly, and the nest is held at that heat for the brood. Below 7 to 10 degrees a bee cannot move, and above 38 degrees it slows. In winter the colony clusters and shivers to keep its core at 20 degrees or more. In a hot hive the bee spits up a drop of nectar and lets it evaporate, which cools the head by 10 degrees.

Diet and feeding

Honey bees eat nectar and pollen from flowers. A forager sucks nectar with her tongue and stores it in a crop at the front of the gut. She combs pollen off her body into the baskets on her hind legs. Bees also take honeydew, the sweet waste of aphids, and will rob a weak hive of its stores.

Back at the hive the forager passes the nectar to younger workers, who chew it for about 30 minutes with enzymes. They spread it in open cells and fan it with their wings until the water content falls below 20%. The result is honey, mostly glucose and fructose, which they seal under wax and which never rots. Nectar starts at nearly 80% water. Pollen ferments into bee bread, the protein food for the larvae.

Foraging happens only by day, but never in heavy rain or high wind. Light rain stops pollen collection but not nectar collection. A worker cannot fly once her body drops below 10 degrees, and a sudden change in light sends every forager home. In North America some native milkweeds trap and kill honey bees, whose feet catch in the flowers' slits.

Behaviour and social life

The colony is a superorganism, and the colony, not the bee, is the unit that reproduces. A healthy hive in midsummer holds 40,000 to 80,000 bees. Females make up 90% or more of them at any time. The queen does nothing but lay eggs, and her pheromones stop the workers from laying. Drones exist to mate, and in temperate climates the workers throw them out before winter to starve.

A worker changes job as she ages. For her first 10 days she cleans cells and feeds larvae with jelly from glands in her head. In her second week her wax glands switch on and she builds comb. Between days 12 and 25 she takes a turn as a guard at the entrance. After about three weeks her glands shrink and she forages until she dies.

A colony reproduces by swarming in spring or early summer. Workers raise one to two dozen new queens, and just before they emerge the old queen leaves with about two-thirds of the adults. The swarm hangs in a tree while scouts search for a cavity. In the old hive the first new queen to emerge stings her sisters to death in their cells. Workers also police the hive and eat any eggs laid by another worker.

Communication and senses

Karl von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize for showing that bees talk with dance. A forager back from a rich patch runs a figure of eight across the face of the comb. The angle of the straight run from vertical gives the direction of the food relative to the sun. The length of the waggle gives the distance, and the vigour of the dance gives the quality. A simpler round dance means food is close, within about 50 metres, but gives no direction. A young bee picks up the dance in part by watching older dancers.

Pheromones govern almost every activity: mating, alarm, defence, orientation and recognising nest mates. Each hive has its own scent, and guards attack any bee that smells wrong. When a worker stings, her sting releases an alarm pheromone that draws other workers to the enemy. A worker also shakes a nest mate with a jerking signal to change her activity, and experienced foragers give 92% of these signals.

The eyes see ultraviolet light, which shows markings on flowers that people cannot see. Part of the eye senses polarised light, so a bee can find the sun on a cloudy day. Bees hear vibration, and workers feel the waggle dance through the comb. New queens pipe to each other before they emerge.

Reproduction and life cycle

A young queen flies out to a spot where drones gather, usually about 9 metres above a clearing, with males from many hives. The drones smell her, spot her by eye and couple with her in the air. She mates with 1 to 17 drones over one or more flights within two weeks of emerging, and never again. Each drone dies at once, because mating tears his body.

The queen lays one egg in each wax cell. At the peak of spring she may lay over 2,500 a day, more than her own weight. A fertilised egg becomes a female, and an unfertilised egg in a larger cell becomes a drone. Eggs hatch in 28 to 144 hours, depending on warmth, into blind, legless larvae. Nurse bees feed every larva royal jelly for three days, then switch future workers to bee bread. A larva that stays on royal jelly grows into a queen.

After about a week the nurses seal the cell and the larva spins a cocoon and pupates. A queen emerges after 16 days, a worker after 21 and a drone after 24. Summer workers live 2 to 4 weeks, and winter workers up to 11 months. A queen usually lives 2 to 3 years, and some reach 5. When her sperm store runs low she lays more drone eggs, so beekeepers replace her every year or two.

Predators and threats

Bee-eaters are the specialist bird hunters, and flycatchers, grackles and summer tanagers pick off bees at the hive entrance. Hornets, beewolf wasps, dragonflies, robber flies and crab spiders take bees in the field. Toads and opossums sit at the entrance and eat workers as they leave. Bears, honey badgers, skunks and even baboons and chimpanzees tear open nests for the honey and brood. In Africa the greater honeyguide leads a mammal to a nest and feeds on the comb once it is opened.

The worst enemy is the mite Varroa destructor, which jumped from the Asian honey bee. Its young feed on bee larvae and pupae, and adults spread viruses among the workers. It has reached every continent except Australia, and it wiped out nearly all the wild colonies in North America. Tracheal mites, the small hive beetle, wax moths, foulbrood bacteria, chalkbrood fungus and at least 18 viruses also attack colonies. Colony collapse disorder, first named in 2006 and 2007, empties a hive of its workers with no single known cause.

Pesticides add to the load. A 2020 study found that neonicotinoids disturbed bee development, and drones suffered more than females. Farm chemicals can also upset the bacteria in the bee gut.

Population and conservation

The IUCN Red List rates the western honey bee as Data Deficient, as of 2025. The species is enormously numerous in hives, but nobody knows how many wild colonies remain. iNaturalist holds 725,171 observations of it. In Europe the worry is that commercial beekeeping swamps local subspecies with imported stock.

Varroa mites cut North American and European colonies badly in the early 1990s. Chemical treatments and better husbandry saved most commercial operations. Wild colonies are slowly recovering in mild climates, as natural selection favours mite-resistant bees. Some subspecies groom mites off each other and pull infected brood from the comb, and breeders now select for that habit.

In the Americas and Australia the honey bee is not native, and some entomologists see it as a threat. In San Diego County it made up about 98% of bee biomass in 2025. A 2017 review found evidence that managed bees compete with wild bees and pass them diseases. The US Department of Agriculture does not list it as invasive.

Relationship with humans

Rock art in France and Spain shows people taking honey about 7,000 BCE. Egyptian tomb paintings show beekeeping before 2600 BCE. Beekeepers have bred for gentle bees that swarm less, survive cold and make more honey than they need. Some biologists call the species domesticated, and others say it is a wild insect that people merely house. Drones mate freely with wild colonies, so the managed and wild populations mix.

Pollination is worth far more than honey. In 2005 the bee's global commercial value was put at just under 200 billion dollars. One estimate in 2000 put its value to US food crops at 14.6 billion dollars a year. California almonds need two hives per acre, and their February bloom draws more than a third of all managed hives in the country. Trucks carry hives to apples in New York and Washington and to blueberries in Maine.

A hive yields honey, wax for candles, pollen, propolis, royal jelly and edible brood. Propolis gives a Stradivarius violin its red colour. A single sting hurts but is harmless unless the person is allergic. Around 20 stings for each kilogram of body weight can threaten a life. Africanised bees in the Americas attack in far greater numbers and have killed many people.

In culture and myth

In Greek tradition bees were messengers of the gods, and Aristaeus was the god of beekeeping. The priestesses at Delphi were called bees. In ancient Egypt the bee was the symbol of Lower Egypt. Napoleon took the bee as his emblem, and it is embroidered on his robes.

In Britain and much of Europe a family would tell the bees of a death in the house, or the bees would leave. Utah calls itself the Beehive State, and Manchester wears the worker bee as its symbol of industry. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Native Americans saw the arrival of bees as a sign that settlers were near. Across cultures the bee probably stands for hard work and order because of the visible discipline of the hive.