Asian honey bee
Apis ceranaEusocial, colony survives the winterStores a harvestable surplus
The western honey bee's counterpart across Asia, and a bee whose importance is out of all proportion to its honey yield. Apis cerana is the original host of Varroa destructor — the mite that has reshaped beekeeping worldwide — and it lives with the parasite without collapse. Understanding how is one of the more consequential open questions in apiculture.
Can it sting?
Stings as the western honey bee does, with a barbed sting. Generally regarded as less defensive, though this varies by population.
How to recognise it
Similar in form to the western honey bee but smaller and generally darker, with more sharply defined abdominal banding. A side-by-side comparison is unambiguous; a glance is not.
- Smaller than Apis mellifera, with more contrasted dark banding.
- Builds several parallel combs in a cavity, like A. mellifera and unlike the giant and dwarf honey bees, which build a single exposed comb.
- Distinguished from Apis dorsata and Apis florea — both also native across its range — mainly by nesting behaviour and size.
Body length 8–13 mm (typically 10 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
- 6,000–20,000 individuals
- Colony lifespan
- Perennial, but colonies abscond far more readily than A. mellifera.
- Winter
- Clusters through winter in temperate parts of its range; in tropical parts there is no true winter and the colony instead responds to dearth by absconding — abandoning the nest entirely and relocating, a behaviour western honey bees show much less readily.
- Castes
- Queen, Worker, Drone
- Nesting
- Wax comb in a cavity
Multiple parallel combs in a cavity, typically in smaller spaces than A. mellifera chooses. Traditional Asian beekeeping uses log hives, wall cavities and simple boxes suited to this.
- Carries pollen
- Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg
- On the wing
- February to December
Year-round in tropical parts of the range.
Lifecycle
- Egg to adultBroadly as in the western honey bee, with slightly shorter development times — worker development takes around 19-20 days rather than 21.
Where it lives and what it does
- Habitat
- Forest, farmland, orchards and villages, from tropical lowlands to Himalayan foothills — a climatic range at least as wide as the western honey bee's.
- Distribution
- Native across southern and eastern Asia, from Afghanistan and India through China, Korea and Japan to Indonesia and the Philippines. Introduced accidentally to parts of Australasia, where it is treated as an invasive species.
- Behaviour
- Two behaviours stand out, both defensive and both absent in the western honey bee. Against Varroa, A. cerana grooms intensively and removes infested brood, and the mite reproduces mainly in drone cells — so the parasite persists at a level the colony tolerates. Against predatory hornets, workers of the Japanese subspecies mob an intruding scout and vibrate their flight muscles in a tight ball, raising the temperature inside it to around 46 °C — above the hornet's tolerance and just below their own. The bee cooks the hornet. Colonies also perform a synchronised abdomen-raising 'shimmering' wave across the comb face that disrupts approaching predators.
- Pollination role
- The principal managed pollinator across much of Asia, and better suited than the western honey bee to smallholder agriculture and to forest and mountain conditions. It flies at lower temperatures and in poorer weather, and forages on a wider range of flowers, though from a smaller colony.
Honey
Stores a harvestable surplus
Yields far less than the western honey bee — a fraction of the surplus from a smaller colony — which is why A. mellifera has been introduced widely across Asia, with mixed consequences for the native species.
Relationship with people
- How people interact with it
- Kept for millennia across Asia in log hives, wall cavities and clay pots, in traditions distinct from European beekeeping and often integrated into forest and orchard management. Displaced in commercial contexts by the higher-yielding western honey bee, which has also brought diseases the native species had not encountered.
- Management
- Widely kept by smallholders. Its readiness to abscond makes it harder to manage intensively, which is both a limitation and part of why it remains resilient.
- Conservation
- Not globally threatened, but under pressure locally from competition with introduced A. mellifera, from pathogen spillover, and from forest loss. The introduction of western honey bees into its range is a conservation issue in its own right.
Sources
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
- The Bees of the World — Johns Hopkins University Press (2007) · Textbook
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this bee
- What is a honey bee?A specific insect, not a category. Nearly everything people know about bees is drawn from one species out of roughly twenty thousand.
- Varroa and the health of a honey bee colonyOne parasitic mite explains most of what has gone wrong for managed honey bees in the last forty years. It is not a mystery, it is not colony collapse disorder, and it is not the reason wild bees are declining.
- How bees regulate hive temperatureA honey bee colony holds its brood nest between 34 and 35 °C year-round, in climates ranging from Siberian winter to Australian summer. It does this with shivering, fanning and evaporative cooling, and the precision matters.
- The threats facing beesBee decline is not one problem with one cause. It is a set of interacting pressures whose relative weight differs between managed honey bees and wild species — and confusing the two produces bad solutions.
- A history of honeyFor most of human history, honey was the only concentrated sweetness available. Almost everything about its cultural weight follows from that, and from how abruptly it ended.
- Honey from the other honey beesApis mellifera is one of roughly eight honey bees. The other seven make honey too — hunted from cliff faces, cut from open combs in forest canopy, or kept in log hives across Asia — and most of it never reaches a Western shelf.
- Traditional beehives around the worldLogs, bark, clay, straw, cork, gourds and holes in walls. Traditional hive design is not a ladder leading up to the frame hive — it is a set of answers to different climates, different bees and different economies, several of which beat a modern hive on the terms they were built for.
- How traditional harvesting differs from modern beekeepingNot a before and after. Wild harvesting, provided cavities, fixed-comb hives and frame hives are points on a gradient of how much a person controls, and most of the world's beekeeping sits somewhere in the middle of it.
- How a colony organises itselfNobody gives orders. Hygiene, defence, cooling, comb geometry and the decision to abandon a nest all emerge from individual bees following local rules — and several of the results are stranger than any instruction would be.
- The yellow-legged hornetAn Asian hornet that reached France in the mid-2000s and has been spreading across Europe since. It hunts honey bees at the hive entrance, it is not the giant hornet of the headlines, and its status in Britain changed materially during 2025.
Traditions involving this bee
How people get honey from it, and whether they still do.
- Smoking a colonyWidespread living practiceThe one technique that appears in every documented harvesting tradition on earth, and in the earliest depictions. It works by interfering with alarm communication and by making bees gorge, and both effects were understood thousands of years after the practice was universal.
- Western Ghats rock-bee honey huntingLocal living practiceAdivasi communities in the Nilgiris and the wider Western Ghats harvesting Apis dorsata combs from cliffs and tall trees, with cooperative marketing that changed what collectors are paid and, with it, how the harvest is done.
- Fixed-comb hivesWidespread living practiceThe category almost every traditional hive belongs to: the bees attach comb directly to the container, so it cannot be lifted out. That single fact determines how the hive is harvested, whether it can be inspected, and why harvesting was destructive for most of history.
- Log hivesWidespread living practiceA hollowed section of trunk, closed at both ends, with a small flight hole. The most widespread hive form on earth, in continuous use from Ethiopia to the Himalaya to the Yucatán, and the direct ancestor of both the Egyptian clay cylinder and the modern top-bar hive.
- Wall hivesPractised, decliningA cavity built into the wall of a house during construction, with a flight hole outside and an access panel indoors. Common across the Himalaya, parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and still occupied in older buildings.
- Gourd, basket and improvised hivesWidespread living practiceWhatever holds a cavity. Gourds, coiled baskets sealed with dung, upturned pots, oil drums and packing cases are the commonest hives in several countries and almost never appear in accounts of traditional beekeeping.
- Keeping the Asian honey beeWidespread living practiceLog hives, wall cavities and box hives for Apis cerana across South, Southeast and East Asia. A different animal from the western honey bee in ways that break European management assumptions, and the reason imported frame-hive advice so often fails.
- Japanese box-hive beekeepingLocal living practiceStacked wooden boxes for Apis cerana japonica, harvested once a year by taking the top box. A minority practice alongside a much larger introduced Apis mellifera sector, sustained partly by a bee that can defend itself against giant hornets.
- Korean mountain beekeepingPractised, decliningKeeping the native Asian honey bee in log and plank hives in the mountain villages of Korea, harvested once a year in autumn. A tradition defined by a bee that resists intensive management and by the forest it depends on.
Tools for supporting this bee
- Plant recommendation tool
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- Bee-friendly garden planner
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- Flowering calendar
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