Caucasian honey bee

How to recognise it

Dark grey-brown with pale grey hair, similar in colouring to Carniolan stock and generally slightly darker. The distinguishing character is not visible: a proboscis of 7.0-7.2 mm against roughly 6.3 mm in most subspecies.

• Dark with grey hair banding; not reliably separable from Carniolan stock by eye.
• In a hive, heavy propolis use — frames glued down, gaps sealed, sometimes the entrance narrowed to a slot.
• Working red clover and other deeper flowers that other honey bees ignore.
• Slow spring build-up and a late peak.

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 in cold conditions, having built up slowly and stored steadily. Consumption is moderate.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Drones

Nesting

Wax comb in a cavity

Cavity-nesting, and the most enthusiastic propolis user of any subspecies. Colonies coat the interior, seal every gap and can reduce the entrance to a narrow slot — an adaptation to cold mountain valleys that becomes a nuisance in a frame hive.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

March to November

Lifecycle

1. 1Slow build-upExpands late and steadily rather than explosively, which loses the early flows and avoids the risk of a large brood nest in a cold snap.
2. 2Long foraging seasonWorks late into the autumn and continues foraging in conditions that ground other stock.
3. 3Low swarming tendencyConsiderably less inclined to swarm than Carniolan bees, which is a substantial part of its appeal.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Mountain valleys, subalpine meadow and forest in the Caucasus, and managed apiaries well beyond it.

Distribution

Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and adjacent Russia and Turkey natively; widely used in Russia, eastern Europe, Turkey and North America.

Behaviour

Calm, methodical and slow to start. The long tongue is the trait worth knowing: it allows legitimate foraging on red clover, vetches and other deep-corolla legumes that a 6 mm tongue cannot reach, which makes this the one honey bee subspecies that meaningfully overlaps with long-tongued bumblebee forage.

Pollination role

An effective crop pollinator with a genuine advantage on deeper flowers, and historically of interest for red clover seed production for exactly that reason.

Very high, with a real advantage on deep-corolla legumes that other honey bees cannot work.

What it forages on

Broad, and unusually able to exploit deep-corolla legumes — red clover above all.

Honey

Stores a harvestable surplus

Productive, with the caveat that heavy propolis contaminates cappings and makes comb honey production difficult. Georgian mountain honey is the traditional product.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Widely exported from the Caucasus through the twentieth century, particularly into Russia and eastern Europe, and valued for gentleness. The propolis habit is the main reason it never displaced Italian stock commercially.

Management

Frames need a hive tool and determination. Some beekeepers value the propolis as a harvestable product in its own right, which turns the drawback into a second crop.

Conservation

Not threatened. Georgia has taken steps to protect the subspecies within its borders against imported stock, on a similar model to Slovenia's protection of carnica.