Honey Bees

Most people aren't able to recognize a honey bee when they see one. They are wrongly associated with both bumblebees and wasps. Honey bees are much smaller and have a body more like that of a large fly. The reason why people aren't familiar with honey bees is because they are not scavengers like wasps so unless you are an avid gardener with lots of pollinator friendly flowers, you will not commonly see them around your patio.



Name: Honey Bee - Apis Mellifera
Size: 1.0 - 1.5cm
Colour: Pastel Yellow, Brown, Black
Nesting Sites: tree hollows, large man made hollows
Nesting Material: Wax Comb
Colony Size: 10,000-80,000
Food: Pollen, Nectar
Stinger: Barbed, can only sting once

Unlike wasps and bumblebees, a honey bee colony will survive through winter by forming a very tight cluster and vibrating for warmth. The population will gradually decline through winter, but when spring arrives and the weather improves the colony will immediately begin foraging and starting to raise brood. Once there is sufficient nectar and pollen available the queen will start laying more eggs, a productive queen can lay anywhere from 1200-2000 eggs a day. These eggs take around three weeks to become new nurse bees. Once a nurse bee hatches she immediately gets to work feeding young larva and eventually she will graduate into a guard bee protecting the hive entrance. She will then start taking orientation flights and will soon become a forager until she dies. Honey bees work very hard during their life and will only survive 6 weeks, they are literally worked to death. During the summer the colony will work hard to produce enough stores to survive the winter. Depending on the climate a colony will need anywhere from 30lbs to 60lbs of honey to survive, they use this honey as energy to generate heat by vibrating their flight muscles. A honey bee queen can survive many winters, living up to 5 years, but eventually she will start running out of sperm to fertilize eggs. Since all workers are female that hatch from fertilized eggs, they will sense the old queen is failing and start making a new queen. Unfertilized eggs hatch into male drones that do no hive work while draining hive resources and only exist to mate. While the life of a drone may seem glamorous, they die in the mating process and any drones left in the hive before winter will be forced from the hive by the workers to freeze/starve to death.

Honey bee colonies reproduce in what is known as a swarm. Most people hear swarm and they immediately think of an angry mass of attacking bees and this could be the furthest from the truth. There are many reasons that hive can swarm, but the most common is that the hive population has grown to large for the space it is in. The bees will recognize this and start making a new queen. When she hatches she will take over the duties of the old queen who will leave with a large portion of the bees to find a new nest location. While at first glance a swarm can be unnerving with thousands of bees flying around and forming a large hanging cluster, they are actually very docile. Because honey bees die when they sting they are very reluctant to do so. They will only ever sting to defend their brood or if their own person life is in danger. Since a swarm has no hive to defend they are not in the mind set to sting, also because they have stuffed their bellies full of honey for the journey it makes it very difficult for them to physically bend their bodies to sting.

There are many species of honey bees with different positive and negative beekeeping traits. They all slightly differ in colour and the most common are seen below:

Carniolan, Apis Mellifera Carnica


Italian, Apis Mellifera Ligustica


Caucasian, Apis Mellifera Caucasa


German Black, Apis Mellifera Mellifera


Maybe the most infamous of honey bee species is Apis Mellifera Scutellata or as the media have dubbed it the "Killer honey bee". The africanized honey bee does not differ in any way from the regular European honey bee, but it does defend it's hive in a more vigorous manner. They are very territorial and will chase any intruders to their territorial boundary. While being labelled as killers these bees are still manageable and are kept by beekeepers in southern climates. Originating from a warmer climate in South America, africanized bees have migrated as far north as Southern California but cannot survive the cooler winters of northern states.