What is a honey bee?

One genus, eight or so species

Honey bees are the genus Apis, and there are only around eight to eleven species in it depending on where taxonomists draw lines. Two matter most: Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, which produces essentially all commercial honey, and Apis cerana, its Asian counterpart. The giant honey bee Apis dorsata and the dwarf honey bee Apis florea build single exposed combs rather than nesting in cavities, and their honey is harvested from wild colonies rather than kept.

Against that, there are roughly 20,000 bee species worldwide. Honey bees are a fraction of one percent of bee diversity, and they are not typical of it in any respect that matters — not in sociality, not in nesting, not in diet breadth, and not in whether they make honey.

What makes a bee a bee

Bees are wasps that turned vegetarian. They evolved from predatory wasps somewhere around 120 million years ago, alongside the flowering plants, and the defining change was dietary: bees provision their young with pollen and nectar rather than with paralysed insects. Almost every other bee feature follows from that — branched body hairs that catch pollen, specialised carrying structures, and mouthparts built for drinking.

• Branched, feathery hairs. Wasps have straight ones. This is the single most reliable structural distinction, and it is why bees look furry and wasps look polished.
• A pollen-carrying structure — a corbicula on the hind leg in honey bees and bumblebees, dense scopal hairs on the leg or abdomen in most others.
• A proboscis for drinking nectar, of a length that determines which flowers the bee can use.
• Four wings, with the hind pair hooked to the forewings in flight. Hoverflies, which mimic bees convincingly, have two wings and short stubby antennae.

What makes a honey bee unusual