Western Honey Bee

Apis mellifera

The architect who draws maps in dance

The western honey bee is one of the most highly social pollinating insects. A colony has a single queen, tens of thousands of workers, and a few drones, coordinated through pheromones and dance. Over its few weeks of life, a worker moves through jobs — cleaning the nest, tending brood, building comb, and foraging.

Key figures

Length

Workers about 12–13 mm; queens can reach 18–20 mm

Weight

Workers weigh about 90 mg; over its lifetime one worker produces less than 1 g of honey

Lifespan

Summer workers live about 5–6 weeks; overwintering workers can survive several months

Habitat

Nests in tree hollows, rock crevices, or artificial hives; the colony stays active year-round without hibernating

Diet

Feeds on nectar and pollen; nectar is converted into honey as winter food stores

Communication

Uses the direction and duration of the waggle dance to tell nestmates the bearing and distance to a food source

Life cycle

Egg → Larva → Pupa → Adult (worker/queen/drone)

Ecological role

As one of the world’s most important commercial pollinators, it pollinates large numbers of food and cash crops; colony health is also regarded as a sensitive indicator of pesticide pollution and ecological stress.

Did you know

The waggle dance is more than a dance — its angle encodes the sun’s bearing, its duration the distance to food, one of the few known symbolic systems in a non-human animal encoding abstract spatial information.

Range

Native to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; now spread through beekeeping to every continent except Antarctica

Status

Widely kept in managed hives, but wild populations are threatened by pesticides, parasitic mites, and habitat loss

Anatomy

• Stinger — Barbed and cannot be pulled back out; after stinging, the worker dies as her internal organs are torn away — a fate limited to workers
• Pollen basket (corbicula) — A concave structure on the hind leg’s tibia used to carry compacted pollen loads back to the hive
• Wings — Forewings and hindwings link together via a row of tiny hooks (hamuli) into a single surface, beating about 230 times per second
• Compound eyes — Can detect ultraviolet light, revealing nectar guide patterns on flowers that are invisible to the human eye
• Antennae — Sense scent and vibration, serving as the colony’s main organ for exchanging pheromone signals
• Thorax — Bears two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs; its flight muscles generate heat that also helps keep the hive warm

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