Dwarf honey bee

How to recognise it

Small — around 7-10 mm, noticeably smaller than a western honey bee — with a distinctly reddish-brown first abdominal segment and pale bands behind it. The nest is a single comb roughly the size of a hand, built around a horizontal twig and concealed in foliage.

• Very small for a honey bee, and with a distinct rust-red band at the front of the abdomen.
• The nest is a single small comb wrapped around a twig, usually hidden inside a bush.
• The top of the comb is a broad horizontal crown where the bees dance in the open.
• Found in south and southeast Asia and, increasingly, the Middle East and Africa.

Body length 7–10 mm (typically 8.5 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

3,000–12,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Continuous, though colonies abscond and relocate readily.

Winter

No true overwintering. Colonies migrate locally in response to forage and disturbance, abandoning the nest and rebuilding elsewhere.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Drones

Nesting

Wax comb in a cavity

A single small comb built around a horizontal twig, usually within a couple of metres of the ground and hidden inside dense foliage. Concealment rather than defence is the strategy. The bees also apply sticky bands of plant resin to the supporting twig on either side of the nest, which stops ants reaching the comb — a simple and effective piece of engineering.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Active year-round in its tropical and subtropical range.

Lifecycle

1. 1Nest foundingA swarm selects a concealed twig in a shrub and builds a single comb wrapped around it.
2. 2Colony lifeThe colony is small by honey bee standards and stores modest quantities of honey in the crown of the comb, above the brood.
3. 3Absconding and migrationReadily abandons the nest in response to disturbance, predation or forage failure, and rebuilds elsewhere — often several times a year.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Open scrub, gardens, orchards, agricultural land and dry forest in warm climates.

Distribution

Native to south and southeast Asia and the Middle East, and expanding — it has established in Sudan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East since the 1980s, apparently spread by trade.

Behaviour

The dance is the reason this bee matters scientifically. On a vertical comb, a honey bee must translate the direction of a food source into an angle from vertical, using gravity as a stand-in for the sun. Apis florea dances on the horizontal crown of its comb with a clear view of the sky, and simply points at the target. That is almost certainly the ancestral form from which the vertical, gravity-referenced dance of the cavity-nesting honey bees evolved.

Pollination role

A significant pollinator of small-flowered crops and wild plants across its range, and effective on flowers too small for larger bees to work economically.

High on small-flowered plants, where its size is an advantage rather than a limitation.

Honey

Stores small quantities, occasionally harvested

Stores modest quantities in the crown of the comb — typically under a kilogram — which is harvested locally across its range but is not a commercial product. The nest is usually destroyed in the process, which is a real conservation issue given how easily colonies are found.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Harvested opportunistically rather than kept, and generally tolerated in gardens and orchards. Its scientific significance far exceeds its economic one: the horizontal dance is a key piece of evidence in understanding how the honey bee dance language evolved.

Conservation

Not globally threatened and locally reduced by nest destruction during honey collection and by insecticide use. Its recent range expansion into Africa and the Middle East raises unresolved questions about competition with native bees.