Honey bee anatomy
A honey bee is a flying nectar processor with a comb-building factory attached. Almost every structure on it maps directly onto a job the colony needs done.
The three body sections
- Head — eyes, antennae, mouthparts and the brain. The sensory and feeding end.
- Thorax — the engine. Both pairs of wings and all six legs attach here, powered by flight muscles that also generate heat.
- Abdomen — the processing and defence end, holding the honey stomach, the wax glands, the scent gland and the sting.
The head
| Structure | What it is | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Compound eyes | Two, of about 6,900 facets in a worker | Motion detection, colour vision into the ultraviolet |
| Ocelli | Three simple eyes on top of the head | Detect light intensity; used for orientation and horizon |
| Antennae | Segmented, with thousands of sensory pits | Smell, touch, taste, humidity, carbon dioxide |
| Mandibles | Smooth jaws | Working wax, grooming, gripping, chewing out of the cell |
| Proboscis | A folding tongue | Drawing nectar; the length decides which flowers are usable |
The antennae deserve emphasis. A bee's world is chiefly chemical, and an antenna carries several thousand sensory structures. Bees detect flower scent, nestmate identity, queen pheromone and the state of the brood almost entirely through them.
The thorax
Two pairs of wings, hooked together in flight by a row of hooks so that they act as one surface, driven indirectly — the muscles deform the thorax rather than pulling on the wings, which is what allows a wingbeat of around 230 per second.
Those same flight muscles are also the colony's heater. A bee can decouple her wings and shiver the muscles to generate heat, which is how the cluster warms in winter and how the brood nest is held at 34-35 °C.
The hind legs carry the corbicula — the pollen basket — a smooth concave area fringed with hairs into which packed pollen is pressed. Only honey bees, bumblebees, stingless bees and orchid bees have one; most bees carry pollen dry in a brush of hairs instead.
The abdomen
| Structure | What it does |
|---|---|
| Honey stomach | A crop holding around 40 mg of nectar, separate from the digestive gut |
| Wax glands | Four pairs on the underside, secreting wax scales in bees of about 12-18 days old |
| Nasonov gland | Releases an orientation pheromone; the bee stands and fans to guide others home |
| Sting | A modified ovipositor, barbed in workers, with a venom sac attached |
| Spiracles and tracheae | Air enters through the body wall; bees have no lungs |
What is different in the other castes
A queen has a longer abdomen, a smooth unbarbed sting she can use repeatedly, and no pollen baskets or wax glands — she does no foraging and builds nothing. A drone is bulkier with enormous eyes that meet on top of his head, has no sting at all, and no pollen-carrying structures. His eyes are the giveaway, and they exist because his single job is to find a queen in flight.
Sources
- The Biology of the Honey Bee — Harvard University Press (1987) · Textbook
- The Bees of the World — Johns Hopkins University Press (2007) · Textbook
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Read next
Tools that use this
- Plant recommendation tool
Which plant fills this specific gap?
- Bee-friendly garden planner
What should I plant in the space I actually have?