Africanized honey bee

How to recognise it

Visually indistinguishable from European honey bees in the field. They average very slightly smaller, but the overlap is complete and no reliable identification is possible by eye — laboratory morphometrics or DNA analysis is required, which is a fact worth stating plainly given how confidently the identification is often made.

• Not identifiable by appearance. Any claim to have identified one by looking at it is wrong.
• Behavioural signals only, and even these are indicative: rapid, large-scale defensive response to disturbance near the nest.
• Nests in a wider range of cavities than European bees, including small ones — water meter boxes, tyres, wall voids, overturned containers.
• Swarms far more frequently, and absconds — abandoning the nest entirely — in conditions where European bees would stay.

Body length 10–15 mm (typically 12 mm).

Biology

Social organisation

Eusocial, colony survives the winter

Overlapping generations, division of labour, and a colony that persists through winter as a cluster. Honey bees, and the reason they store honey at all.

Colony size at peak

10,000–60,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Several years, though colonies abscond and relocate far more readily than European stock.

Winter

Clusters as European honey bees do, but with smaller stores and less cold tolerance — which is the main reason the northward spread through North America stalled. Their range limit is a winter limit.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Drones

Nesting

Wax comb in a cavity

Occupies a much wider range of cavities than European honey bees and will use far smaller ones, including exposed sites. This is the main practical reason for human encounters: a colony in a wall void or a meter box beside a path is disturbed routinely, where one in a hollow tree is not.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Year-round in the tropical and subtropical range that suits them. Their absence from cooler regions is a limit of cold tolerance rather than of geography.

Lifecycle

1. 1Colony growthDevelops faster than European stock, with a shorter worker development time and quicker build-up, which is part of why it outcompetes and takes over European colonies through drone dominance and supersedure.
2. 2Swarming and abscondingSwarms several times more often than European colonies and will abandon a nest entirely in response to disturbance, food shortage or parasite pressure. Rapid reproduction and mobility are what carried the population across two continents in forty years.
3. 3DefenceResponds to a disturbance in a fraction of the time European bees take, recruits an order of magnitude more workers to it, and continues pursuit for a far greater distance — reported at several hundred metres against a few tens of metres.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Tropical and subtropical lowlands, deserts, savannah and urban areas throughout their range. They thrive in cities.

Distribution

South and Central America, Mexico, and the southern United States from Florida and Texas across to California and Nevada. The northern limit is set by winter severity and has been broadly stable for some years.

Behaviour

Everything about them is faster and more mobile: quicker to build up, quicker to swarm, quicker to abandon a nest, quicker to defend it. It is worth being precise about the defensiveness, because the popular framing has it wrong — these bees are not aggressive in the sense of seeking confrontation. Away from the nest, foraging Africanized bees on flowers are no more likely to sting than any other honey bee, and people work among them daily throughout Latin America. The behaviour is defensive, proportionate to the perceived threat, and triggered at a much lower threshold.

Pollination role

Effective pollinators, and in much of Latin America the dominant managed and feral pollinator. Their spread has had complicated consequences for native bees, competing with stingless bees for forage and nest cavities across a continent where stingless bees were the original honey producers.

As effective as any western honey bee, and often more abundant.

Honey

Stores a harvestable surplus

Produces honey well — in some tropical conditions better than European stock, being better adapted to heat, drought and local parasites. Much of the honey exported from Brazil and Mexico comes from Africanized colonies, which is a fact largely absent from the way these bees are discussed.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

The result of a research programme that escaped. In 1956 the geneticist Warwick Kerr imported African queens to Brazil to breed a honey bee better suited to tropical conditions than the poorly-adapted European stock then in use. In 1957 twenty-six swarms escaped from an experimental apiary near Rio Claro, and the resulting hybrids spread north and south at roughly 300 to 500 km a year, reaching Central America in the 1980s and Texas in 1990. Latin American beekeeping adapted rather than collapsed: protective equipment improved, apiaries moved away from paths and livestock, and requeening with gentler stock became routine. Production recovered and in several countries exceeded what it had been.

Management

Managed successfully throughout Latin America using techniques any beekeeper can learn — siting apiaries well away from people and tethered animals, working with more smoke and full protective equipment, and requeening colonies that show excessive defensiveness. The practical lesson from seventy years of coexistence is that this is a management problem rather than an emergency.

Conservation

Not a conservation concern in itself; the conservation question runs the other way. Feral Africanized colonies compete with native bees, particularly the stingless bees that were the Americas' original honey producers, and the scale of that competition across a continent is not well quantified.