- Also spelled:
- honey bee
- Key People:
- Charles Henry Turner
honeybee
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What is a honeybee?
A honeybee is any member of a small group of social bees known for making honey. The honeybee tribe Apini has one genus, Apis, which contains seven species. The term honeybee usually refers to Apis mellifera, also known as the western honeybee, which is familiar and economically important.
Honeybees are eusocial insects that live in cooperative nests or hives. They communicate with each other through dancing movements that convey the location, distance, size, and quality of food sources. Honeybees gather nectar from flowers and store it in their honey stomachs. Enzymes break down complex sugars into simpler ones, which turns nectar into honey. They then store the honey in honeycomb cells made of beeswax.
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What do honeybees look like?
Honeybees are social insects with two sexes (male and female) and two female castes: workers and queens. Workers, the most numerous, are about 0.5 inch long, while queens are larger. Males, or drones, are bigger than workers but smaller than queens and are present mainly in early summer. Workers and queens have stingers, but drones don't.
Like other insects, honeybees have a chitinous exoskeleton, with bodies divided into three parts: head, thorax, and abdomen. The head has two large compound eyes and three simple eyes, plus odor-detecting antennae. Honeybees also have specialized mouthparts with a sucking proboscis and mandibles for chewing.
The striped abdomen has six visible sections with tiny openings called spiracles for respiration. The underside has four pairs of wax glands. Workers also have pollen baskets, or corbicula, on their hind legs for collecting pollen.
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Where do honeybees live?
Western honeybees are native to Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East, but they can be found on almost every continent. Honeybees live in hives, which are composed of two layers of six-sided cells made of wax produced by worker bees. These cells store food in the form of honey, plant nectar, and bee bread.
During the winter, when temperatures drop below 50 °F (10 °C), honeybees retreat to their hives and form a winter cluster to keep warm. They rely on a robust population, plentiful honey stores, and a secure hive to survive the cold.
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How do honeybees make honey?
Honeybees, primarily the domesticated Apis mellifera, are the main commercial producers of honey. They gather nectar, sometimes from non-floral sources, and store it in their honey stomachs. While flying back to the hive, enzymes in their stomachs break down the nectar's complex sugars into simpler ones, which is essential for honey transformation. Nectar is converted into honey through the breakdown of sucrose into fructose and glucose.
Back at the hive, bees store the nectar in honeycomb cells made of beeswax, where the breakdown of sucrose continues and water content is reduced. They beat their wings to promote evaporation and then seal the cells with wax. This preserves the honey, a crucial food source for the colony, especially during winter. Beekeepers often add supers to the hives to increase honey production. Once filled and sealed, the honeycombs are removed, uncapped, and the honey is extracted, heated, strained, and packaged.
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Why are honeybees important for pollination?
Honeybees are vital pollinators for ecological and agricultural reasons. Around 20,000 species of bees contribute significantly to the reproduction of flowering plants, which allows for the creation of fruits and seeds. Many plants would struggle to reproduce without bees, which would cause a dramatic decline in plant biodiversity, which would affect entire ecosystems and human agriculture.
Honeybees can pollinate about 90 crops in the United States, including blueberries, apples, cucumbers, and almonds. They are efficient and adaptable pollinators that can live in natural settings and human-provided hives in many climates. The plants that honeybees help to sustain act as food and shelter for various wildlife.
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How do honeybees communicate with each other in the hive?
Honeybees communicate in several sophisticated ways to ensure colony survival and efficiency.
Methods of Communication
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Pheromones Honeybees use pheromones to communicate various messages, including alarm signals, attracting mates, and colony recognition. The queen bee emits a "queen substance" that prevents workers from raising new queens and inhibits ovary development in worker bees.
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Waggle Dance Foragers use the waggle dance to communicate the location and abundance of distant food sources. The dance involves a figure-eight pattern with a straight "walk" during which the bee flutters its wings.
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Other Signals Honeybees also use tactile signals within the dark hive, where workers monitor dancing bees with their antennae. They can detect danger through secreted alarm substances that alert the colony.
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honeybee, (tribe Apini), any of a small group of social bees that make honey. The tribe comprises a single genus —Apis—of which there are seven species. The term honeybee is commonly applied to a single species, Apis mellifera, the familiar and economically important western honeybee.
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Arthropoda
- Class: Insecta
- Order: Hymenoptera
- Suborder: Apocrita
- Family: Apidae
See also list of ants, bees, and wasps.
All honeybees are eusocial insects and live together in cooperative nests or hives. The honeybee is remarkable for the dancing movements it performs in the hive to communicate information to its fellow bees about the location, distance, size, and quality of a particular food source in the surrounding area.
The following sections provide an overview of the different honeybee species, honeybee biology, and diseases of honeybees. For more detailed information on honeybees, their colonies, and diseases, see the articles western honeybee, beekeeping, and colony collapse disorder.
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Apis species
With the exception of A. mellifera, all other Apis species are confined to parts of southern or southeastern Asia. A. florea, the dwarf honeybee, occurs in southern Asia, where it builds its nests in trees and shrubs. A. andreniformis, the black dwarf honeybee, is native to forested habitats of southeastern Asia. A. dorsata, the giant honeybee, also occurs in southeastern Asia and sometimes builds combs nearly three meters (more than nine feet) in diameter. A. cerana, the Eastern honeybee, is native to southern and southeastern Asia, where it has become domesticated in some areas. It is very closely related to A. koschevnikovi, or Koschevnikov’s bee, which is found only on Borneo and several other islands in Southeast Asia and on the Malay Peninsula. A. nigrocincta is native to Indonesia and Mindanao island in the Philippines. There are also a number of subspecies and strains of Apis.
A. mellifera is about 1.2 cm (about 0.5 inch) long, although size varies among the several strains of this species. The head and thorax, or midsection, are somewhat bristly and vary in color according to the strain. Two large compound eyes and three simple eyes, or ocelli, are located on top of the head. Keen eyesight is complemented by two sensitive odor-detecting antennae.
Africanized honeybees (Apis mellifera scutellata ×A. mellifera) are a hybrid honeybee that resulted from the accidental release of African honeybees into the Western Hemisphere in 1957 and their subsequent crossbreeding with local European honeybees. They are generally smaller and more defensive than their European counterparts.
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Honeybee sexes and castes
There are two honeybee sexes, male and female, and two female castes. The two female castes are known as workers, which are females that do not attain sexual maturity, and queens, females that are larger than the workers. The males, or drones, are larger than the workers and are present only in early summer. The workers and queens have stingers, whereas the drones are stingless.
Queen honeybees store sperm in a structure known as the spermatheca, which allows them to control the fertilization of their eggs. Thus queens can lay eggs that are either unfertilized or fertilized. Unfertilized eggs develop into drones, whereas fertilized eggs develop into females, which may be either workers or virgin queens. Eggs destined to become queens are deposited in queen cells, which are vertical cells in the honeycomb that are larger than normal. After hatching, the virgin queens are fed royal jelly, a substance produced by the salivary glands of the workers. When not fed a diet consisting solely of royal jelly, virgin queens will develop into workers. During the swarming season, in the presence of a weak queen or in the absence of a queen, workers may lay unfertilized eggs, which give rise to drones.
Life cycle
For all three forms of honeybees, eggs hatch in three days and then develop into larvae that are known as grubs. All grubs are fed royal jelly at first, but only the future queens are continued on the diet. When fully grown, the grubs transform into pupae. Queens emerge in 16 days, workers in about 21 days (on average), and drones in 24 days. After emerging, the queens fight among themselves until only one remains in the hive. The old queen and the majority of her workers typically have left the hive by the time the new queens emerge. The swarm, which typically reproduces during swarming, may form two or more new colonies at different nesting sites.
Polyandry
A queen will often mate with many drones, a mating behavior known as polyandry. Polyandry increases genetic diversity within a colony and thereby improves colony fitness and survival. Genetically diverse colonies have characteristics—such as increased population size, foraging activity, and food supplies—that favor the production of new queens and the formation of new colonies.
Hives
The hive is a series of combs composed of two layers of six-sided cells made of wax produced and secreted by the workers. Food in the form of honey, plant nectar, and so-called bee bread, made from pollen, is stored in the cells. Honey, which the bees produce from the nectar of flowers, was virtually the only form of sugar readily available to humans until modern times. For this reason, honeybees have been domesticated by humans for centuries. The art of caring for and managing colonies of honeybees is known as beekeeping. Besides producing honey, honeybees play an important role in agriculture as pollinators of a wide variety of domesticated plants.
Diseases of honeybees
Honeybee colonies are susceptible to a variety of diseases and parasites. Examples of agents that have been particularly devastating for colonies in Europe and North America include the nonnative parasites Varroa destructor and Tropilaelaps clareae. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), which was first reported in 2006 in the United States, caused massive colony losses and presented significant challenges for crop pollination, a major service of the beekeeping industry in North America. The detection of CCD also heightened previous concerns about suspected declines in honeybee populations in the United States and elsewhere.