Cape honey bee

How to recognise it

A dark honey bee, generally smaller and darker than the neighbouring scutellata, with limited banding. As with all subspecies, visual identification is unreliable and the important differences are behavioural and genetic rather than visible.

• Dark, with limited abdominal banding.
• Not reliably separable from scutellata by eye.
• In an infested colony: laying workers producing female brood, a dwindling adult population and eventual collapse.
• Restricted naturally to the fynbos and Cape region of South Africa.

Body length 10–14 mm (typically 11.5 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

15,000–50,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Several years in an unparasitised colony.

Winter

No true winter in the Cape. Colonies respond to the Mediterranean-climate dry season and to fire cycles rather than to cold.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Drones, Pseudo-queens — laying workers producing female offspring

Nesting

Wax comb in a cavity

Cavity-nesting on parallel combs, in the fynbos of the Western and Eastern Cape.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Lifecycle

1. 1Thelytokous laying workersA capensis worker can lay eggs that develop into females rather than males, without mating. In a queenless colony this is a repair mechanism — the colony can rear a new queen from a worker's egg.
2. 2Social parasitismIntroduced into a scutellata colony, a capensis worker begins laying, develops queen-like pheromones, and is fed and tended as a pseudo-queen. She produces more capensis workers, which do no work and lay in turn. The host queen is lost, the workforce is not replaced, and the colony dies.
3. 3SpreadThe parasitic clone spreads between colonies as workers drift or are moved by beekeepers. A single lineage traced genetically has been spreading through South African apiaries since the 1990s.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

The fynbos of the Western and Eastern Cape, plus managed apiaries and agricultural landscapes across the region.

Distribution

Naturally restricted to the Cape region of South Africa, with a hybrid zone where it meets scutellata further north. Introduced beyond that zone by beekeepers, with severe consequences.

Behaviour

In its own range, an ordinary and productive honey bee. Outside it, a social parasite. The distinction matters: capensis is not a pest in the fynbos, where scutellata does not occur and the parasitic strategy has nowhere to operate.

Pollination role

The principal managed pollinator of the Western Cape's substantial deciduous fruit industry, and an important pollinator of fynbos flora — a floral kingdom with around nine thousand plant species, two thirds of them endemic.

Very high, and it underpins both fynbos ecology and Western Cape fruit production.

What it forages on

Works the fynbos flora — ericas, proteas, buchu and hundreds of others — plus deciduous fruit and canola in the agricultural Cape.

Honey

Stores a harvestable surplus

Produces the fynbos honey of the Western Cape, a complex multifloral drawn from one of the richest floral regions on earth.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

A productive managed bee at home and an expensive problem when moved. The capensis calamity of the 1990s onwards, caused by beekeepers transporting Cape colonies north for pollination contracts, killed very large numbers of scutellata colonies and remains a live management issue.

Management

South African practice now includes restrictions on moving Cape bees out of their natural range. For beekeepers in the affected zone, management centres on recognising laying-worker infestation early and destroying affected colonies before the clone spreads.

Conservation

Not threatened. It is one of the more striking illustrations available that moving bees between regions has consequences, and that a perfectly ordinary animal in one place can be a catastrophe two hundred kilometres away.