Stores a harvestable surplus

The bees that make honey in the sense everybody means. A very small group — the honey bees and several stingless bee genera — and the reason this site exists.

22 records · honey production

Western honey beeApis melliferaThe bee behind essentially all the world's honey, and the one most people mean when they say 'bee'. Apis mellifera is a perennial eusocial insect that overwinters as a living cluster rather than dying back each year — which is the whole reason it stores honey in quantity, and therefore the reason it was ever domesticated. It is native to Europe, Africa and western Asia and has been carried by people to every continent except Antarctica.
Asian honey beeApis ceranaThe 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.
Stingless beesMeliponiniThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.
Africanized honey beeApis mellifera scutellata hybridsThe most misreported animal in this catalogue. Africanized honey bees are ordinary western honey bees with African ancestry, and they differ from European stock in degree rather than in kind: they respond to disturbance faster, commit more workers to defence, and pursue an intruder further. They are not more venomous, they do not hunt people, and they make perfectly good honey. The name that stuck to them came from a 1970s press cycle, and it has outlived every attempt to correct it.
Giant honey beeApis dorsataThe largest honey bee in the world, and the one that cannot be kept. Apis dorsata builds a single enormous open comb hanging from a branch or a cliff overhang, defends it ferociously, migrates hundreds of kilometres seasonally, and has defeated every serious attempt to hive it. It produces a great deal of honey and all of it has to be hunted rather than farmed — which is why the honey it makes comes with rope ladders and night climbs attached.
Himalayan giant honey beeApis laboriosaThe largest honey bee in the world, nesting on sheer Himalayan cliff faces at altitudes up to four thousand metres, and the source of the red honey harvested by Nepalese honey hunters descending rope ladders down rock walls. It was regarded as a high-altitude form of the giant honey bee until the 1980s and is now generally treated as a separate species, and it is the only honey bee adapted to genuine mountain cold.
Italian honey beeApis mellifera ligusticaThe most widely kept honey bee subspecies in the world, and the golden-banded bee most people picture when they think of one. Italian bees were exported from the Ligurian valleys from the mid nineteenth century and now underpin commercial beekeeping across the Americas, Australasia and much of Europe — chosen for gentleness, prolific brood rearing and a strong disinclination to swarm.
Carniolan honey beeApis mellifera carnicaThe second most widely kept honey bee subspecies, and the one most European beekeepers choose over Italian stock. Carniolans come from the eastern Alps and the Balkans, and they are adapted to a short intense season: explosive spring build-up, rapid contraction in a dearth, frugal winter consumption — and a swarming instinct that gives beekeepers more work than any other trait.
European dark beeApis mellifera melliferaThe honey bee that was native to northern Europe before anyone imported anything, and one that has been hybridised close to extinction across most of its range. The dark bee is slow to build, frugal, long-lived, and adapted to cold wet summers and long winters — traits that made it unfashionable when Italian stock arrived, and that look considerably more valuable now than they did in 1900.
African honey beeApis mellifera scutellataThe tropically adapted African honey bee that, crossed with European stock in Brazil in 1957, produced the Africanized populations of the Americas. In its own range it is simply the honey bee of eastern and southern Africa — productive, mobile, defensive, and superbly adapted to heat, drought and a formidable list of predators including honey badgers, ants and hive beetles.
Cape honey beeApis mellifera capensisA honey bee subspecies with a piece of biology that should not work and does. Cape worker bees can lay diploid female eggs without mating — thelytokous parthenogenesis, effectively cloning themselves — which means a worker can become a reproductive without ever becoming a queen. Introduced into the range of neighbouring African bees, that capacity turns into a social parasite that destroys colonies wholesale, and the resulting capensis problem has cost South African beekeeping enormously.
Iberian honey beeApis mellifera iberiensisThe honey bee of Spain and Portugal, and one of the more genetically interesting subspecies in Europe — it carries ancestry from both the western European dark bee lineage and the African lineage across the Strait of Gibraltar, in a gradient running from north to south. It is defensive, frugal, prone to swarming, and superbly adapted to a landscape of long dry summers.
Caucasian honey beeApis mellifera caucasiaThe longest-tongued honey bee subspecies, and the one that can work red clover where others cannot. Caucasians come from the high valleys of Georgia and the surrounding mountains, and they carry two distinctive traits: a tongue reaching over 7 mm, and an enthusiasm for propolis that makes their hives genuinely difficult to open.
Buckfast beeApis mellifera hybridA honey bee breed rather than a subspecies, created at Buckfast Abbey in Devon by Brother Adam over roughly seventy years from the 1920s onwards. He travelled extensively collecting stock from across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and bred deliberately for gentleness, productivity, disease resistance and low swarming. The result is one of the most widely kept bees in Europe and a genuinely unusual piece of animal breeding.
Anatolian honey beeApis mellifera anatoliacaThe honey bee of central Turkey, and one of the subspecies at the heart of the species' evolutionary story — Anatolia sits close to where the western honey bee's lineages meet, and Turkey holds more honey bee subspecies within one country than anywhere else. It is hardy, frugal, defensive, and adapted to a continental climate of hard winters and hot dry summers.
Egyptian honey beeApis mellifera lamarckiiThe honey bee of the Nile valley, and the subspecies depicted in the oldest images of beekeeping anywhere — the Fifth Dynasty reliefs at Abu Ghurab from around 2400 BCE show this bee being smoked, extracted and jarred. It is small, yellow, nervous and superbly adapted to desert heat, and it has been progressively displaced within Egypt by imported Italian stock.
Koschevnikov's honey beeApis koschevnikoviA cavity-nesting honey bee of the Bornean and Sumatran rainforest, distinct from the Asian honey bee it shares that forest with, and not confirmed as a separate species until the 1980s. It is coppery-red, restricted to primary and secondary lowland rainforest, and it is among the least studied honey bees in the world.
African mountain honey beeApis mellifera monticolaA honey bee of the high mountains of East Africa — Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, the Ethiopian highlands and the Ruwenzori — living above 2,000 metres in conditions no other African honey bee tolerates. It is larger, darker, hairier and markedly gentler than the lowland African bee, and it has attracted breeding interest for exactly that combination.
Melipona beesMeliponaThe large stingless bees of the American tropics, and the ones worth keeping for honey. Melipona are honey bee sized or bigger, build substantial colonies, and store enough surplus that a hive can be harvested annually without ruining it — which is why every major indigenous beekeeping tradition in the Americas is built on this genus rather than on the smaller meliponines around it.
Scaptotrigona beesScaptotrigonaThe populous and pugnacious stingless bees of Mesoamerica. Scaptotrigona colonies run to tens of thousands of workers rather than the few hundred typical of Melipona, and they defend themselves vigorously — which makes them a very different animal to keep, and a considerably more productive one.
UruçuMelipona scutellarisThe large stingless bee of northeastern Brazil's Atlantic forest, and the species most Brazilian meliponiculture in the region is built around. Colonies are strong by meliponine standards, which is what makes commercial production possible at all.
JandaíraMelipona subnitidaThe stingless bee of the Brazilian caatinga, adapted to a semi-arid thorn forest where the flowering follows the rains and the dry season can last most of a year. Smaller than uruçu, and the species most caatinga meliponiculture is built on.

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