Western Honey Bee (Apis mellifera): Facts, Hive and Honey

What does a western honey bee look like?

A worker honey bee is a slim, golden-brown to dark brown insect with bands across its abdomen and a thin coat of branched hairs on its body. The hairs pick up pollen grains as the bee clambers over flowers. Color varies with the subspecies: Italian bees are bright amber, Carniolan bees are gray-brown, and the dark European bee of northern Europe is almost black.

Like all insects, a honey bee has three body parts. The head carries two antennae, two large compound eyes, three small simple eyes called ocelli, and mouthparts that combine jaws for handling wax with a tongue for sucking up nectar. The thorax holds two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs. Each hind leg of a worker has a pollen basket, a smooth hollow fringed with stiff hairs where the bee packs pollen into a colorful pellet.

There are three kinds of adult in every colony, and they look different:

Drones are stocky, with huge eyes that meet on top of the head, and they have no stinger. The queen has a long, tapering abdomen that sticks out well beyond her folded wings.

Size and how many bees live in a colony

A worker weighs only about 0.1 g (0.004 oz). A colony is another matter: in summer a healthy colony usually holds 20,000–80,000 bees, nearly all of them workers, plus a few hundred to a few thousand drones and one queen. In winter the population falls to a much smaller cluster that keeps itself warm by shivering its flight muscles.

Because colonies survive for years and reproduce as a unit, biologists often describe them as a superorganism. No single bee can live alone for long, but together they regulate the nest temperature at about 35 °C (95 °F) around the brood, store food for the winter and defend the entrance.

Habitat and range

The western honey bee evolved in Africa or western Asia and spread naturally through Africa, the Middle East and Europe, as far north as southern Scandinavia. Across this range it split into about 30 recognized subspecies adapted to very different climates, from the cold-hardy dark European bee to the African Apis mellifera scutellata of the savannas.

People then carried it around the world. Colonists brought hives to Virginia around 1622, and honey bees later reached South America, Australia (1822) and New Zealand (1839). Today it lives wherever there are flowers and a dry cavity for a nest, from Mediterranean scrub and temperate meadows to farmland, orchards, city parks and gardens.

In the wild, colonies nest in hollow trees, rock crevices and wall cavities, usually choosing a space of about 40 liters (11 US gallons) with a small entrance. Most colonies in Europe and North America now live in beekeepers’ hives, but wild colonies still survive in many forests. In the Americas they are an introduced species alongside thousands of native bees.

Diet and foraging

Honey bees are vegetarians. Adults burn the sugar in nectar and honey for energy, and pollen supplies the protein, fats and vitamins that young bees and larvae need to grow. Bees also collect water to cool the nest and plant resins, which they turn into a sticky sealant called propolis.

Foragers mostly work within about 1–3 km (0.6–2 mi) of home, but they can fly 10 km (6 mi) or more when food is scarce. A forager tends to visit one kind of flower on each trip, a habit called flower constancy that makes honey bees efficient pollinators. Back at the hive, nectar is passed to younger bees, who process it into honey and store it in wax cells; you can read the full process in how bees make honey.

The colony’s success depends on teamwork. When a forager finds a rich patch of flowers, she recruits nestmates with the waggle dance, a figure-of-eight run on the comb whose angle and length tell other bees the direction and distance of the food. This “dance language” was decoded by the Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on animal behavior; see how bees communicate.

The hive: comb, wax and division of labor

The heart of every nest is the comb, sheets of six-sided wax cells built back to back. Workers make the wax themselves: glands on the underside of the abdomen secrete thin flakes, which the bees chew and shape. The same cells serve as nurseries for eggs and larvae, larders for pollen (called bee bread once it is packed and stored) and jars for honey.

Workers change jobs as they age, a system called age polyethism:

• First days: cleaning cells and keeping the brood warm.
• Roughly days 3–12: nursing larvae with secretions from glands in the head.
• Roughly days 12–20: making wax, building comb, receiving nectar, guarding the entrance.
• About 3 weeks onward: foraging outside for nectar, pollen, water and resin until the end of life.

The schedule is flexible. If a colony loses many foragers, younger bees switch to foraging early, and some older bees can return to nursing.

Reproduction and life cycle

Honey bees go through complete metamorphosis: egg, larva, pupa and adult. The queen lays one egg in each cell. Fertilized eggs become females and unfertilized eggs become drones. Whether a female larva becomes a worker or a queen depends on her food: all young larvae get royal jelly, but only future queens are fed it throughout their larval life. A queen develops in about 16 days, a worker in about 21 and a drone in about 24.

Colonies reproduce by swarming. In spring or early summer the old queen leaves with roughly half to two-thirds of the workers to found a new nest, while a daughter queen takes over the old one. The young queen flies out to mate in midair with a dozen or more drones, stores their sperm for the rest of her life and can lay up to about 2,000 eggs a day at the peak of the season. Learn more in what a queen bee does and why bees swarm.

How long do honey bees live?

Lifespan depends on caste and season. Summer workers wear themselves out in about 5–7 weeks, while workers raised in late summer, called winter bees, can live 4–6 months. Queens usually live 2–5 years, and there are reports of queens reaching about 8. Drones live a few weeks to around two months and are pushed out of the hive in autumn when food runs short.

Predators, threats and colony losses

Honey bees have many natural enemies, including bee-eaters, honey buzzards, hornets, crab spiders, bears and the honey badger of Africa. Workers defend the colony with a stinger whose barbs lodge in mammal skin, so a worker usually dies after stinging a person or other mammal.

The biggest modern threat is the Varroa mite, a parasite that jumped from the eastern honey bee to the western honey bee in Asia during the 20th century. It spread to Europe from the 1970s, reached the United States in 1987 and was detected in Australia in 2022. Varroa feeds on developing and adult bees and spreads viruses such as deformed wing virus. Combined with poor nutrition, pesticides, other diseases and bad weather, it causes heavy losses: beekeepers in the United States have regularly reported losing 30–50 percent or more of their colonies in a year. In 2006–2007 the sudden disappearance of adult bees from many American hives was named colony collapse disorder.

The arrival of the yellow-legged Asian hornet in Europe and the northern giant hornet in North America added new predators; Asian honey bees defend themselves against hornets with “heat balls”, described in how honey bees fight giant hornets.

Conservation status

The western honey bee has not been assessed for the IUCN Red List as a global species. The first European assessment, in 2014, listed it as Data Deficient, because it is hard to separate truly wild colonies from the huge managed population. In the updated European assessment of October 2025, the IUCN classed wild, free-living honey bee colonies in the European Union as Endangered; managed hives are not part of that assessment.

As a managed animal, the honey bee is not in danger of extinction: the number of beehives worldwide has grown to roughly 100 million. The conservation concerns are local wild populations and native subspecies, such as the dark European bee, which are being lost through hybridization with imported bees. Many wild bees are in far more trouble than the honey bee; see are bees endangered?.

Myths and facts

• Myth: honey bees are native everywhere. They are not native to the Americas, Australia or East Asia. In North America the many native bees, from bumblebees to squash bees, did all the pollinating before 1622.
• Myth: a bee always dies after stinging. Only workers stinging a mammal usually die. A worker can sting another insect and survive, and queens have a smooth stinger.
• Myth: the queen rules the colony. The queen lays eggs and her scent keeps the colony together, but decisions such as when to swarm and where to move are made collectively by the workers.
• Fact: honey bees can be “killer” bees. Africanized honey bees, descended from African bees released in Brazil in 1957, reached Texas in 1990. They are the same species and their venom is no stronger, but they defend their nests in much larger numbers.

Honey bees and people

People have taken honey from wild bees for many thousands of years, and prehistoric rock paintings in Spain show honey hunters on ropes and ladders. Egyptians kept bees in clay hives more than 4,500 years ago. Today beekeepers harvest honey, beeswax, pollen, propolis and royal jelly, and world honey production is close to 2 million tonnes a year.

The bee’s greatest value is pollination. Honey bees are moved by truck to pollinate crops such as almonds, apples, blueberries and canola, and the almond bloom in California each February is the largest managed pollination event in the world. The honey bee is also one of the best-studied animals in science, used to research learning, memory, aging and social behavior, and its genome was sequenced in 2006.