The honey bee is the common name for the genus Apis. The most commonly thought of is Apis Mellifera, the European Honey Bee, which is the species most often kept by humans. Currently they are all under attack by the varroa mite, originally hosted by Apis cerana that has nearly wiped out wild hives and hurt many beekeepers.

The European Honey Bee is also subdivided into races or sub-species. The most common is the Italian, with their distinctive bright yellow and black markings and large size. They produce fairly large amounts of honey, but are more aggressive than some other breeds. Also on the plus side they tend to be more resistant to most bee diseases than others.

Second most common is the Caucasian Honey Bee from the Caucusus Mountains. (Naturally.) They are darker in color, usually having grey and black markings. They are gentler than the Italian Bee though they also tend to glue internal parts of the hive together and so many beekeepers will not keep them.

The third most common race kept in North America is the Carniolan Honey Bee. Their home is generally the upper Danube River valley. They are large and also generally grey in coloration. One problem is they tend to be smaller producers of honey.

German or Black Bees are good producers of honey, but they are even more aggressive than Italian Bees and more susceptible to foulbroods. Because of this susceptibility almost no one in North America keeps them today. On the positive side they tend to use less propolis than other races.

African or Africanized Honey Bees are the notoriously aggressive breed native to various mountain ranges in Africa. Several queens were imported to Brazil in 1956 and they have spread from there to the southern United States and northern parts of Argentina. They cannot stand cold climates so it is not expected that they will spread much further north into America, though they may interbreed and make current strains more aggressive. They tend to attack in mass and this makes them much more dangerous than most other breeds.

Cape Bees are from South Africa. They are not as aggressive as some other sub-species. They are most noted for their ability to start laying eggs when the queen is killed. This makes them unique among honey bees and very studied. Otherwise they are not very notable.

There are other breeds, but most are not as notable as these are or as widely kept.

"It's like this," he said. "When you go after honey with a balloon, the great thing is not to let the bees know you're coming. Now, if you have a green balloon, they might think you were only part of the tree, and not notice you, and if you have a blue balloon, they might think you were only part of the sky, and not notice you, and the question is: Which is most likely?"

"Wouldn't they notice you underneath the balloon?" you asked.

"They might or they might not," said Winnie-the-Pooh. "You never can tell with bees."

— A. A. Milne

Honeybees are probably the most recognised of the bee families; an intrinsic part of lazy summer afternoons spent lying in the garden pretending to read a book, but really soaking up the sun's rays, stretched out like a cat on the grass. My mum is a keen gardener; we had a lot of flowers to keep the bees busy with on a summer's day. The buzzing as they to and fro'ed between the flowerbeds that I'd spent most of the morning trimming was a comfort more than an annoyance, though I know others don't share this view.

I quite like bees. I have a tattoo of a honeybee on my right ankle, and like the real thing, it's usually only seen in the summer when the sun's warm and I can wander around in a skirt and sandals. When people ask 'why a honeybee?', and I try to explain, I often fail to get the words quite right; they tend to wander away muttering 'feminist' to themselves.

So, now, I just tell people, "I likes 'em."

Honeybees

Here are the honeybees' place in the world:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Suborder: Apocrita
Superfamily: Apoidea
Family: Apidae
Subfamily: Apinae
Tribe: Apini
Genus: Apis

There are over 16,000 species of bee (though how and why people count these things, I don't know; still, I'm sure they bring a university somewhere a lot of revenue in the form of research grants, so lets not knock them), but of this incredibly large number, only seven are honeybees. The Apini bees can vary in size from an average 7mm in length to 19mm, and their nests are exposed (in contrast to other bee species who burrow) or contained in cavities such as hives or a hollow tree. These nests consist primarily of combs of hexagonal cells constructed from wax secreted by the sternal glands of the worker bees. There can be either a single or multiple sheet of combs, depending on the species, and they are used to store honey and pollen, as well as for growing and hatching larvae. The queen-producing cells are separate from the other combs, and are irregular in shape; they tend to hang from the worker bee brood cells.

Only four species of honeybee have their honey collected by humans. These species are: Apis mellifera (European or Western honeybee); Apis cerana (Eastern honeybee); Apis florea (Dwarf honeybee); and Apis dorsata (Giant honeybee), of which only the Western honeybee and Eastern honeybee have been domesticated. And by 'domesticated', I mean 'found a way of convincing them to build their nests somewhere where it's convenient for us to steal their honey'. The Giant and Dwarf honeybees each build their nests as a single-comb in the open air, and so the idea of occupying a man-made box doesn't appeal. The Western and Eastern honeybees prefer to build their multi-comb nests in cavities trees, and so are ideally suited for the sheltered, easy-access spaces that are modern beehives. As their names suggest, the Western honeybee subspecies (of which there are 31) are distributed across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The Eastern honeybee (8 subspecies) are found across south and southeast Asia, including India, China, Japan, and Papua New Guinea.

The Dwarf honeybees (2 subspecies) and Giant honeybee are also found in south and southeast Asia. The former favour small trees and shrubs, while the later prefer tree limbs and cliffs. We're still able to gather the honey from the Dwarf and Giant honeybees; it's just a bit more of an effort, and in the case of the Giant honeybee, a hell of a lot more dangerous. Giant honeybees produce large amounts of honey (around 15kg per nest), but are reputed to be very easily roused, very ferocious, and liable to attack a human with little provocation and great persistence; death is not unlikely from these attacks. So, a lot of honey, but at what price? There is some evidence however that the giant honeybee may not be responsible for all the deaths attributed to it, as it is easily confused with the oriental hornet, which is even more savage than the Giant bee (Butler, 1974).

In contrast, the Dwarf honeybees are very gentle and seldom attack, even when their nests are disturbed, not least because they find it difficult to pierce human skin with their tiny, delicate stingers. They only produce very small amounts of honey (no more than 50g per nest), but this honey is prized for its medicinal properties in the areas where it is gathered.

No species of honeybee are native to the Americas, Australia or New Zealand, and so were imported there by humans. It is thought that the first honeybees, mostly Apis mellifera ligustica (the Italian bee), were brought to America from Europe in the mid-seventeenth century; feral swarms gradually made their way across the Great Plains. They never actually managed to cross the Rocky Mountain Range unaided though; instead they had to be brought in by ship to California. The Italian bee also travelled well to Australia and New Zealand.

Other known honeybee species are Apis andreniformis, Apis koschevnikovi, and Apis nigrocincta.

Honeybee society

Honeybees are highly eusocial, that is, there are a number of defined castes within the colony, with each caste only performing the duty that they were born to do: act as a worker to build, feed, and defend the hive; a drone who will one day fertilise a new queen; or as a queen to act as an egg layer, providing a large number of eggs each day to replenish those workers who are lost in the line of duty.

Queen
A hive will only contain a single queen bee, who is highly fertile and lays thousands upon thousands of eggs in her lifetime (around 2-3 years) – 1,500 a day, which is more than her own body weight. Impressive, I'm sure you'll agree. The queen is highly specialised for this task, with no pollen-gathering apparatus; she relies on the workers of the hive to provide her with the food she needs to do her job.

As I mentioned before, queens are hatched from specialised wax cells that are irregular in shape, resembling an acorn in appearance. This means that the mouth of the cell hangs downwards rather than horizontally. Each cell is only used once, and is then destroyed by the workers. Queen eggs are fertilised eggs that are laid into this irregular cell; the difference between the production of workers or queens is that when the egg hatches, the baby queen is fed 'royal jelly', a protein rich food secreted by the nursing worker bees who look after the eggs, for the entirety of her life as a larvae.

Drone
Drones are male honeybees that develop from unfertilised eggs laid by the queen of the hive. They are born with the purpose, and the one purpose only, of one day having the chance to mate with an unfertilised queen when she leaves the hive to make her marriage-flight; they could then, thusly, be described as the hive's luxury item as they consume food and other resources whilst never actually contributing to the welfare of their brothers or sisters. In times of plenty their presence is tolerated; in those of hardship they are forcefully ejected from the hive and left to starve outside of its warmth.

Worker
Worker bees, as their name suggests, are born into a life of drudgery, but one that is far from being described as boring. In her lifetime she gets to work in all the labour roles that keep the hive ticking over: being a housemaid and maintaining the hive's cleanliness; acting as a nanny and caring for the new broods; working as a builder and creating the honeycomb structures for which honeybees are famed; taking on the job of a bouncer and guarding the entrance of the hive from intruders; and playing the role of provider by flying out into the world to collect pollen and nectar to feed the hive. She will work through each of these roles in turn as she ages, and her life span is on average around 4-5 weeks in the summer; however, those worker bees that emerge from their cells in winter months have less work to do, and so can live several months.

Honeybees will only sting you if you really push them into it (though their definition of 'provoked' is probably different from your definition of 'provoked'.) Not least because when they do, it's a fatal measure for them; the plunging of their barbed oviposter into mammalian skin causes it to catch fast, and the bee eventually has to tear itself in two to escape. Of course, it doesn't know this fact before it stings you. But you can bet that it does after it has. Whilst it might seem that having a bee die after she has stung you protecting her hive is flying in the face of evolution, you must remember that the worker bees are unable to mate and so there is no advantage to the survival of a single worker. However, there's a great deal of advantage to the entire hive for them to sacrifice their lives to prevent you or any other attacking mammal from destroying their home. As for why it's advantageous for them to leave the oviposter behind in the skin well, they don't hurt by choice. But whilst the bee is crawling away to find a corner to die in, probably whilst wishing it had picked a different shift for that day, the oviposter continues to pump the bee's venom into your body.

Swarming

The famed 'swarming of the hive' usually occurs in spring/early summer – the time of plenty, when the population of the hive is at its peak, and the young queen bee establishes her place in the hive. The build up to the swarming involves half the population starting to collect at the entrance to the hive; all of a sudden one day, they rush to the honey stores, grab as much as they can carry, and fly from the hive en masse, a the old queen leading the way to pastures anew before she is forcibly ousted by the new queen after her marriage-flight that will occur a few days after the swarming.

The swarm rest on a near-by branch while scouts are sent out to find a new place to live; this is the point where a beekeeper (apiarist) must be on their toes. They have to catch the queen and place her in an empty apiary in order to start a new hive for the harvesting of honey. However, many beekeepers create an artificial swarm by moving the queen of a hive and a couple of combs into a new apiary; the workers in the original apiary then go to the effort of ensuring that a new queen is produced from one of the queen cells as soon as possible, as a hive cannot exist without a queen.

Honeybee produce

It's not just honey that humans keep bees for; other produce that are collected are beeswax, pollen, royal jelly, and propolis (a wax-like substance used by bees as a glue). Beeswax is used to make candles, wood polish and in cosmetics; pollen and royal jelly, and propolis are collected for use as health supplements. I have no idea why people believe that things that are good for bees would also be good for them, but humans aren't the most easily understood of species.

Honeybee ecology

Honeybees are an extremely important species in the scheme of things - it is thanks to them that the vast majority of flower pollination occurs. Plants and bees have a symbiotic relationship: plants benefit from the bees providing a source of cross-pollination as they fly from flower to flower and plant to plant; bees rely on plants to provide them with their food and energy sources in the form of pollen and nectar. Honeybees are used commercially to pollinate crops, and a loss of honeybee populations due to the use of pesticides or disease can be crippling for those whose income is derived from farming.

One of the most important current dangers to honeybee populations is that of the varroa mite, Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that attaches itself to the body of a bee and feeds from the haemolymph – the bee's equivalent of blood – and breed on the larvae of a colony. An infestation of varroa mites in a hive is massively destructive, and the mite is laying waste to large numbers of honeybee populations in the western hemisphere. There are many methods being utilised in order to combat the pest, but nothing foolproof has been found yet, and until it is, honeybee populations will continue to decline.

The Dancing Bees

Most people have noticed that on a summer's picnic, a bee will sometimes join the party. Soon, she will depart, but a small while later, a larger number of bees will visit, and then more, and more, until you give up and go home in order to get away from the blasted things. How do the bees know where to find you?

"The Dancing Bees" is a book of the life and senses of the honeybee by Karl von Frisch. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his work on animal behavioural physiology where he focused his research on the language of the honeybee. He found that one bee was able to communicate to her sisters the source of a new feeding place, and how to get there. On returning to the hive and having deposited her load of honey and pollen, she begins to dance rapidly; as she does, the other bees keep up with her, touching their feelers to her abdomen. This continues, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for a minute, before she suddenly disengages and runs to another part of the hive to repeat the same dance. Then she goes to the entrance of the hive and flies once more to the new food source; on returning, her dance begins again. She is soon joined in the visiting of this new food source by a few, and then many of her sisters.

It was eventually determined that this dance told the others not only of the existence and location of a new food source, but also its distance from the hive; the further away the food source, the fewer the number of bees that will travel there. Von Frisch determined that the bee was waggling of her abdomen in combination with dancing in a figure of eight pattern that resembles the shape of a coffee bean in order to communicate distance and tell the other bees about the location and direction of the food. Von Frisch eventually worked out that the bees were directing each other by trigonometry; the frequency and direction of their waggling corresponded with two things: the direction of the food source, and the direction of the point on horizon just below the sun. The angle between those two lines corresponded exactly with the angle of the waggling run.

Simply amazing.

And yet... the entire picture wasn't seen. There reached a point where the distance to the food source was close enough that the dance of the bee became much simpler to the watching eye; the bee began to dance in circles: clockwise, anticlockwise, she'd dance rapidly, changing direction at seemingly random points as she did so. She no longer waggled her abdomen. This made little sense to those humans who were observing, and yet still perfect sense to the bees that joined in with the dance. In the 1990s, Barbara Shipman, a mathematician who'd grown up with bees and nurtured an endless fascination with them thanks to her father's beekeeping, made an amazing discovery. As an adult, she majored in mathematics, and eventually took up a professorship at the University of Rochester. One day, she was examining the two-dimensional representation of the six-dimensional manifold known as a 'flag manifold'. Looking at the patterns that resulted, she was taken back to the images of her youth, and that of the dancing of the bees. The more she examined, the more she found the flag manifold correlated with the recruitment dance of the bees. She eventually hypothesised that the honeybees were somehow in tune with the quantum world of quarks in their perception of the world. Tiny quantum computers, if you will.

Still more amazing.

And maybe now you can begin to see why I like honeybees.

References

• Butler C G, 1974, "The World of the Honeybee", revised edition, Collin Clear-type Press
• Frank A, 1996, "Quantum Honeybees", Discover; Issue 18
• von Frisch K, 1966, "The Dancing Bees", 2^nd edition, Butler & Tanner Ltd
• Michener C D, 2000, "The Bees of the World", 1^st edition, John Hopkins University Press, pages 806-807

Hon"ey*bee` (?), n. Zool.

Any bee of the genus Apis, which lives in communities and collects honey, esp. the common domesticated hive bee (Apis mellifica), the Italian bee (A. ligustica), and the Arabiab bee (A. fasciata). The two latter are by many entomologists considered only varieties of the common hive bee. Each swarm of bees consists of a large number of workers (barren females), with, ordinarily, one queen or fertile female, but in the swarming season several young queens, and a number of males or drones, are produced.

© Webster 1913.