BEE

Honey bees are often the first animal people picture when they hear the word “bee” but they’re actually one small, unusually organised branch of a much bigger family. Everything about how they live, eat, defend themselves and raise their young revolves around one thing: the colony works as a single unit, not as thousands of individuals.

Common Name	Honeybee
Scientific name	Apis mellifera
Family	Apidae
Colony size	Up to around 50,000–60,000 bees at summer peak
Queen lifespan	Typically 2–3 years
Worker lifespan	About 6 weeks in summer; several months for bees reared in autumn
Diet	Nectar (carbohydrates) and pollen (protein, fats, vitamins)
Native range	Europe, Africa and western Asia; now kept worldwide
Known for	Complex social colonies, and pollinating a huge share of the world’s flowering plants

Not the Only Bee in Town

There are roughly 20,000 known bee species worldwide, and the honey bee’s genus, Apis, contains only a handful of them. Most bees including the majority of Britain and Ireland’s roughly 250 species are solitary: a female builds her own nest, provisions it with pollen and nectar, and never sees her offspring grow up. Honey bees are the exception, not the rule.

Built for the Job

A honey bee’s body is split into head, thorax and abdomen, covered in branched hairs that trap pollen as she moves between flowers. She has four wings that hook together in flight, six legs, with the rear pair modified into “pollen baskets” for carrying her haul home, and five eyes: two large compound eyes for detail, movement and colour, plus three simple eyes (ocelli) on top of her head that sense light levels and help her stay oriented in flight. Only females have a stinger, since it’s a modified egg-laying organ drones never develop.

One Colony, Three Kinds of Bee

• The queen is the colony’s only reproductive female. At her peak she can lay up to around 1,500 eggs a day, mating just once early in her life with several drones and storing that sperm for the rest of her life, sometimes several years.
• Workers are sterile females who do literally everything else: cleaning cells, feeding larvae, building comb, guarding the entrance, and, once older, foraging outside the hive. A worker’s job changes as she ages.
• Drones are males whose only role is to mate with a queen from another colony. They die immediately afterward, and any that fail to mate are usually pushed out of the hive before winter, when they’d otherwise just be extra mouths to feed!

One detail that surprises a lot of people: the queen’s sting is smooth and can be used repeatedly, unlike a worker’s barbed one, but she almost never uses it on anything other than a rival queen. When a hive raises several potential queens at once, the first to emerge will typically seek out and kill her rivals, or fight them to the death if more than one has already hatched.

From Egg to Adult

All three castes start as eggs that hatch after three days into larvae, which are fed and capped inside their cells before pupating. From there, development time depends on caste: roughly 16 days egg-to-adult for a queen, 21 days for a worker, and 24 days for a drone. What decides whether a fertilised egg becomes a queen or a worker isn’t genetics, it’s diet. Queen larvae are fed exclusively on royal jelly; worker larvae get a mix of royal jelly, honey and pollen.

Foraging, Flight and the Waggle Dance

Workers forage for nectar and pollen, usually within a mile of the hive but occasionally much further. When a forager finds a good source of food, she performs a “waggle dance” back at the hive, a figure-eight movement that tells other workers both the direction and distance to the flowers she found. Bees can also detect polarised light and the sun’s position, which lets them navigate accurately even under cloud cover.

Their colour vision is shifted compared to ours: they see ultraviolet and blue very well, but effectively can’t see red. Many flowers have taken advantage of this, developing ultraviolet patterns invisible to us that act as landing guides for pollinators.

Keeping the Hive Alive

A honey bee colony is remarkably good at climate control. The brood area needs to stay within a narrow 33–35°C band for larvae to develop properly, and the colony maintains that year-round, fanning their wings to cool the hive in summer, and clustering tightly around the queen, generating heat with their flight muscles, through winter.

Defence: A Last Resort

Bees don’t sting out of aggression, it’s a defensive last resort, usually carried out by guard bees stationed at the entrance. Because a worker’s stinger is barbed, it lodges in the thick skin of mammals and tears free as she pulls away, which kills her. Against another insect, though, the smooth exit means she can sting and survive.

The most dramatic example of honey bee defence comes from Japan, where native honey bees deal with attacks from giant hornets by swarming around the intruder and vibrating their flight muscles, raising the temperature at the centre of the cluster to around 47°C for up to an hour, hot enough to kill the hornet without harming the bees themselves. Researchers studying the behaviour found a spike in activity in a learning-and-sensory region of the bees’ brains during the attack, though it’s still not clear exactly what role that activity plays.

Bee Stings, Up Close

A worker’s stinger sits in a small pocket at the tip of her abdomen and only extends when she’s genuinely on the defensive. It’s a three-part structure, a central shaft flanked by two barbed lancets, wired to a venom gland. Those barbs are the whole story of why stinging a mammal is fatal for her: they catch in thick, elastic skin, and as she pulls away the entire stinger and venom sac tear loose from her body. Against another insect’s harder exoskeleton, the barbs don’t catch the same way, so she can withdraw the sting and survive.

A typical sting brings sharp, brief pain followed by redness, swelling and itching that usually settle within a few days. If you’re stung:

• Scrape the stinger out sideways with a fingernail or the edge of a card as soon as you can, avoid tweezers, which can squeeze more venom in
• Wash the area with soap and water
• A cold compress helps with pain and swelling

Genuine allergic reactions to stings are uncommon, but they’re the reason to take any sting seriously: swelling of the face or throat, difficulty breathing, or dizziness afterward call for immediate medical attention, not a wait-and-see approach.

Health Challenges

Modern honey bee colonies face several serious health threats: the Varroa destructor mite, which weakens bees directly and spreads viruses between them; American and European foulbrood, two distinct bacterial diseases affecting developing larvae; Nosema, a gut parasite that shortens adult bees’ lives; and chalkbrood, a fungal brood disease. None of these tends to act alone, most serious colony losses come from several stressors combining at once, alongside pesticide exposure and poor nutrition from a lack of diverse flowering plants nearby. Researchers are also looking into plant-derived compounds as a possible complementary tool against some of these problems, though most of that evidence so far comes from lab conditions rather than working hives.

Why They Matter

Bees pollinate a large share of the world’s flowering plants, including many food crops. But it’s worth remembering that honey bees are just one pollinator among thousands of bee species, plus countless other insects and in many regions, wild bees contribute just as much pollination as managed honey bee colonies do, while receiving far less attention and protection.

A Long Partnership with Humans

Beekeeping is thousands of years old: Egyptian wall paintings from around 3000 BCE already show organised hive management, and honey and wax residues have been found in pottery dating back even further. The single biggest change in the craft came in 1851, when Lorenzo Langstroth invented the movable-frame hive still used by most beekeepers today, making it possible to inspect and manage colonies without destroying them.

What People Get Wrong About Bees

“All bees die after they sting.” Only true in a specific case: a honey bee worker stinging a mammal. Her barbed stinger gets stuck in thick skin and tears away as she leaves, which kills her. Against another insect or in the rare case of a queen fighting a rival, the sting comes out cleanly and the bee survives.

“The queen protects the hive.” That’s the workers’ job. The queen’s sting exists for reproduction, not defence, she uses it almost exclusively against rival queens.

“Bees are always looking for a reason to sting you.” Stinging is a genuine last resort, and it costs a worker her life. A bee swarm on the move is often calmer than a settled colony, since it has no hive or brood to defend yet.

“All bees make honey and live in hives.” Most of the world’s roughly 20,000 bee species are solitary and never produce a harvestable amount of honey. The honey bee is the exception that gets all the attention.

“Bees can barely see.” They see very well, just not the way we do. Strong ultraviolet and blue vision, essentially no red vision, plus a use of polarised light for navigation that humans don’t have at all.

“Killer bees are a global threat.” “Africanized” honey bees, hybrids more prone to defending their colonies aggressively, are a real, regionally significant issue in parts of the Americas, but they’re not the honey bees kept in most of the world, and the label gets applied far more broadly in popular culture than the actual risk warrants.

References

• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/120316-hot-bee-balls-hornets-insects-brains-animals-science
• https://www.msdmanuals.com/home/injuries-and-poisoning/bites-and-stings/bee-wasp-hornet-and-ant-stings#Treatment_v829078
• Hristov, Y. V., Koev, K., Tsvetanov, T., & Balkanska, R. (2026). Major Honey Bee Diseases and Possibilities to Control Them with Essential Oils. Insects, 17(6), 634. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects17060634
• Hempel de Ibarra, N., Vorobyev, M. & Menzel, R. Mechanisms, functions and ecology of colour vision in the honeybee. J Comp Physiol A 200, 411–433 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-014-0915-1
• Avarguès-Weber, A., Mota, T. & Giurfa, M. New vistas on honey bee vision. Apidologie 43, 244–268 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-012-0124-2
• https://www.bbka.org.uk/fascinating-facts-about-honey-bees?srsltid=AU7gw4WQWgROLUVs53IP8iJVnWD2PRZdJcwOEiM0cFPCSOGGe1bzYbIt
• Ansaloni, L. S., Kristl, J., Domingues, C. E. C., & Gregorc, A. (2025). An Overview of the Nutritional Requirements of Honey Bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758). Insects, 16(1), 97. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects16010097
• Rodríguez-Vásquez, Samantha & Gardea, Alfonso & Romo, Alejandro & García-Hernández, Jaqueline & Ríos, Humberto & Orozco-Avitia, Jesús. (2024). HIVE TEMPERATURE REGULATION BY HONEYBEES IN RESPONSE TO EXTREME CONDITIONS. Agrociencia. 10.47163/agrociencia.v58i3.3082.

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