Anatolian honey bee

How to recognise it

Variable brown to dark, with moderate pale banding. As with all subspecies, appearance is not diagnostic and identification rests on morphometrics and DNA.

• Not reliably separable by eye from other brown subspecies.
• In a hive, strong propolis use, good overwintering and marked defensiveness.
• Central Anatolian plateau and surrounding regions.
• Turkey holds at least five recognised subspecies, which makes provenance within the country meaningful.

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

25,000–60,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Several years.

Winter

Overwinters well through hard continental winters on modest stores, contracting sharply in autumn.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Drones

Nesting

Wax comb in a cavity

Cavity-nesting on parallel combs. Traditionally kept across Anatolia in log, basket and wall hives, and in the Black Sea region in hollowed chestnut trunks hoisted into trees against bears.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

March to November

Lifecycle

1. 1Spring build-upBuilds steadily rather than explosively, suited to a climate where a late frost is a real risk.
2. 2Summer dearthContracts through the hot dry Anatolian summer and rebuilds on the autumn flows.
3. 3WinterOverwinters frugally, which is the trait that suits it to the plateau.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Continental plateau, mountain, forest and Mediterranean scrub across Anatolia.

Distribution

Central Turkey, with related subspecies in the Caucasus, the Aegean, the southeast and on the Black Sea coast.

Behaviour

Hardy, frugal and adaptable across an unusually wide range of climates within one country. Turkey's position at the meeting point of European, Middle Eastern and Caucasian lineages makes its bees disproportionately important to understanding honey bee evolution and diversity.

Pollination role

The principal managed pollinator of Turkish agriculture, which includes very substantial fruit, nut and vegetable production.

Very high, and adapted to a wide range of Turkish climates.

What it forages on

Anatolian steppe and mountain flora, chestnut forest on the Black Sea coast, and Mediterranean scrub in the south.

Honey

Stores a harvestable surplus

Turkey is one of the world's largest honey producers. This subspecies and its neighbours produce the country's pine honeydew, chestnut, oregano, thyme and — in the northeast — the rhododendron honey sold as deli bal.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Kept across Anatolia for millennia, with beekeeping traditions including the hoisted chestnut-trunk hives of the Black Sea coast, designed specifically against bears. Turkey's subspecies diversity has made it a focus of conservation genetics.

Conservation

Not threatened, and under introgression pressure from queen movement within Turkey itself — which is why several Turkish regions now operate protected areas for particular subspecies.