western honeybee, (Apis mellifera), economically important species of honeybee valued for its pollination services and for its production of honey and beeswax. Western honeybees are native to Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East but are kept and have become naturalized on almost every continent.

Importance

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The economic, ecological, and cultural importance of western honeybees cannot be overstated. The efficient and adaptable pollinators can thrive in both natural and human-provided hives in many climates throughout the world. Although they are not native to many of the areas in which they are now found, they pollinate a wide variety of wild and cultivated plants, allowing the plants to produce the next generation of seeds. In antiquity honey was often the only abundant source of sucrose for the human diet, and it has been valued as a source of mead and for its medicinal properties. It remains important as a sweetener and is an ingredient in many cosmetics and medical wound dressings. Similarly, beeswax—the most widely distributed and important animal wax—has long been used for candles and is an important component in furniture and floor waxes, leather dressings, waxed paper, lithographic inks, cosmetics, and ointments.

As the art and science of beekeeping developed throughout the ages, the less direct value of western honeybees as agricultural implements began to be recognized. With the green revolution and the rise of industrial agriculture in the 1970s, managed hives became nearly essential for the pollination of more than 90 commercially grown crops, including numerous fruits, nuts, and vegetables. In the United States alone, beekeepers manage about 2.6 million colonies of western honeybees—often moving the hives to fields and orchards across the country to service emerging blooms throughout the year. For example, California’s astonishing almond industry, which supplies between 50 and 80 percent of all the almonds harvested worldwide every year, relies almost exclusively on pollination by the billions of western honeybees that are brought in for the brief flowering season each spring. It is estimated that the pollination services of western honeybees in the United States contributes more than $15 billion in crops annually.

Physical description

There are two honeybee sexes, male and female, and two female castes. The two female castes are known as workers, females that do not attain sexual maturity, and queens, females that do attain sexual maturity and are larger than the workers. Workers are the most abundant individuals in a colony and are about 1.2 cm (about 0.5 inch) long, although size varies among the several strains of this species. The males, or drones, are larger than the workers and smaller than the queens and are present only in early summer. The workers and queens have venomous stingers, whereas the drones are stingless.

Like all insects, western honeybees have a chitinous exoskeleton, and their bodies are divided into three segments: the head, thorax, and abdomen. The head and thorax 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. Their keen eyesight, which includes the ability to perceive ultraviolet light, is complemented by two sensitive odor-detecting antennae. Honeybees also have specialized mouth parts that include both a sucking proboscis and mandibles for chewing. The mandibles permit the insects to manipulate wax and clean other bees, while the proboscis is used to collect, share, and consume nectar, water, and honey.

The striped abdomen is formed of six visible sections, each of which is dotted with tiny openings, known as spiracles, used for respiration. The underside of the abdomen has four pairs of wax glands. The wax exuded from these glands appears as thin, clear scales on the abdomen and is later chewed and mixed with saliva to form whitish beeswax for the hive. Workers are also equipped with a specialized pollen-collecting structure on the fourth segment of both of the hind legs, known as a pollen basket, or corbicula.

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Bee sting

Like other honeybees, western honeybee workers will defend their colony and will sting if provoked. The worker bee stinger is barbed, and in the act of stinging it is torn from the bee, resulting in the insect’s death. The stinger has a venom-filled poison sac and muscles attached that continue to work the stinger deeper into the flesh for several minutes and increase the amount of venom injected. To prevent this, the stinger should be scraped loose (rather than grasped and pulled out) at once. Bee stings are painful, and no one becomes immune to the pain. Immunity to the swelling is usually built up after a few stings, however. Normal reaction to a bee sting is immediate, intense pain at the site of the sting. This lasts for a minute or two and is followed by a reddening, which may spread an inch or more. Swelling may not become apparent until the following day, and the site often becomes very itchy.

Occasionally, acute allergic reactions develop from a sting, usually with persons who have other allergic problems. Known as anaphylaxis, such a reaction becomes evident in less than an hour and may consist of extreme difficulty in breathing, heart irregularity, shock, splotched skin, and speech difficulty. Such persons should obtain the services of a medical doctor immediately.

Colony and life cycle

Western honeybees are eusocial insects noted for providing their nests with large amounts of honey. A colony of honeybees is a highly complex cluster of individuals that functions virtually as a single organism. It usually consists of the queen bee, a fertilized female capable of laying a thousand or more eggs per day; from about 10,000 to 65,000 adult but sexually undeveloped female worker bees; and from none to 1,000 male drones. 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 (a whitish food with the consistency of mayonnaise, produced by certain brood-food glands in the heads of the worker bees) at first, but only the future queens are continued on the diet. When fully grown, the grubs transform into pupae. Adult queens emerge in 16 days, workers in about 21 days (on average), and drones in 24 days.

Western honeybee workers collect nectar, a sugary solution, from nectaries in blossoms and sometimes from nectaries on the leaves or stems of plants. Nectar may consist of 50 to 80 percent water, but, when the bees convert it into honey, it will contain only about 16 to 18 percent water. Sometimes they collect honeydew, an exudate from certain plant-sucking insects, and store it as honey. The primary carbohydrate diet of bees is honey. They also collect pollen from the anthers of flowers, which provides the essential proteins necessary for the rearing of young bees. In the act of collecting nectar and pollen to provision the nest, the bees pollinate the flowers they visit. Honeybees also collect propolis, a resinous material from buds of trees, for sealing cracks in the hive or for covering foreign objects in the hive that they cannot remove. They collect water to air-condition the hive and to dilute the honey when they consume it. A populous colony in a desirable location may, in a year’s time, collect and carry into the hive as much as 450 kg (1,000 pounds) of nectar, water, and pollen. The workers use dancelike movements to communicate information from one individual to another about the location, distance, quantity, and quality of a particular food source.

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Worker bees secrete tiny flakes of beeswax and mold it into honeycomb—thin-walled, back-to-back, six-sided cells. The use of the cell varies depending on the needs of the colony. Honey or pollen may be stored in some cells, while the queen lays eggs, normally one per cell, in others. The area where the bees develop from the eggs is called the broodnest. Generally, honey is stored toward the top of the combs, and pollen is held in cells around the broodnest, which is below the honey.

When the colony becomes crowded with adult bees and there are insufficient cells in which the queen can lay large numbers of eggs, the worker bees select a dozen or so tiny larvae that would otherwise develop into worker bees. These larvae are fed copiously with royal jelly. The cell in which the selected larvae are developing are drawn out downward and enlarged to permit development of the larger-bodied queens. Shortly before these virgin queens emerge as adults from their queen cells, the mother queen departs from the beehive with a swarm. Swarming usually occurs during the middle of a warm day, when the queen and a portion of the worker bees (usually from 5,000 to 25,000) suddenly swirl out of the hive and into the air. After a few minutes’ flight, the queen alights, preferably on a branch of a tree but sometimes on a roof, a parked automobile, or even a fire hydrant. All the bees settle into a tight cluster around her while a handful of scouts reconnoiter a new homesite. When the scout bees have located a new domicile, the cluster breaks. The swarm takes to the air and in a swirling mass proceeds to the new home. Swarming is the bees’ natural method of propagating a new colony.

Back in the parent colony, the first queen to emerge after the mother queen departs with the swarm immediately attempts to destroy the others. If two or more emerge at the same time, they fight to the death. When the surviving virgin is about a week old, she soars off on her mating flight. To maintain genetic diversity within a colony, a queen frequently mates with more than one drone (called polyandry) while in the air. She may repeat the mating flights for two or three successive days, after which she begins egg laying. She rarely ever leaves the hive again except with a swarm. Normally, sufficient sperm are stored in her sperm pouch, or spermatheca, to fertilize all the eggs she will lay for the rest of her life. The drones die in the act of mating.

Pests and diseases

Western 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. For additional discussion, see beekeeping: Disease and pest control.

Colony collapse disorder (CCD), which was first reported in 2006 in the United States, is a serious disorder affecting western honeybee colonies. It is characterized by sudden colony death, with a lack of healthy adult bees inside the hive. The disorder appears to affect the adult bees’ ability to navigate; affected workers leave the hive to forage for nectar and pollen and never return. Honey and pollen are usually present in the hive, and there is often evidence of recent brood rearing. In some cases the queen and a small number of survivor bees may remain in the brood nest. Although the cause is not known, researchers suspect that multiple factors may be involved. CCD has caused massive colony losses and presents significant challenges for crop pollination.