Iberian honey bee

How to recognise it

Dark brown to nearly black with sparse pale banding, similar to the European dark bee it is related to. Lighter and slightly smaller towards the south, where African ancestry increases.

• Dark, with limited abdominal banding.
• Not reliably separable from other dark subspecies by eye; the gradient is established by morphometrics and DNA.
• In a hive, marked defensiveness and a strong tendency to swarm and abscond.
• Iberian peninsula only, with a north-south ancestry cline.

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

20,000–60,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Several years.

Winter

Mild Iberian winters mean short confinement and continued flight on warm days. Colonies contract but rarely face the long cluster of northern Europe.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Drones

Nesting

Wax comb in a cavity

Cavity-nesting on parallel combs. Traditionally kept in cork hives across Extremadura and the Alentejo, a design well suited to the heat.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

February to November

Lifecycle

1. 1Early build-upResponds to the early Mediterranean flows — rosemary from March, rockrose and citrus in spring — and builds fast.
2. 2Summer dearthContracts sharply through the summer drought when the landscape shuts down, and rebuilds on the autumn eucalyptus and carob flows.
3. 3Swarming and abscondingSwarms readily and will abandon a nest under pressure, which is a southern trait shared with its African ancestry.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Mediterranean scrub, cork and holm oak dehesa, eucalyptus plantation, mountain and farmland across the Iberian peninsula.

Distribution

Spain and Portugal, with the African ancestry component increasing towards the south.

Behaviour

Frugal, responsive and mobile. Its adaptation is to a landscape with a hard summer gap rather than a hard winter, which is the opposite problem northern subspecies face and produces the opposite strategy — contract in July rather than in January.

Pollination role

The principal managed pollinator of Iberian agriculture, and worked hard in almond, citrus, sunflower and rapeseed.

Very high, and specifically adapted to Mediterranean flowering patterns.

What it forages on

Rockrose, rosemary, thyme, lavender, citrus, eucalyptus and carob — the Mediterranean scrub and plantation sequence.

Honey

Stores a harvestable surplus

Produces the rosemary, rockrose, thyme, orange blossom, eucalyptus and carob honeys of the peninsula. Spain is one of Europe's largest honey producers and this is the bee doing it.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Kept across Iberia since antiquity, latterly in cork hives and now in frame hives. Its hybrid ancestry made it a subject of considerable research interest, since the Strait of Gibraltar is one of very few places where the African and European honey bee lineages meet naturally.

Conservation

Not threatened, and under the same introgression pressure as every European subspecies from imported Italian and Carniolan queens.