“A single worker honey bee makes only about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime.”
Western honeybees live in colonies organized around a queen, thousands of workers, and seasonally produced drones. Workers turn nectar into honey, collect pollen for protein, and pollinate wild and cultivated plants as they move between flowers.
By An Nguyen · Published · Updated
Apis mellifera Hymenoptera Apidae
Measured against the 176 species profiled on this site. Each figure is converted to one unit system from the published range on the page, so the ranks are computed, not quoted.
| Measure | This species | Rank here | Exceeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body mass | 0.11 g | #174 of 176#9 of 11 Insecta | 1% |
| Body length | 2 cm | #174 of 176#9 of 11 Insecta | 1% |
| Lifespan in the wild | 5 yr | #154 of 169#2 of 11 Insecta | 7% |
Closest in body mass
Ranks use the upper end of each published adult range, so they compare typical large adults rather than records, and metrics with no published number are left out rather than estimated. The full table is downloadable from the species dataset, and any two species can be put side by side in the comparison tool.
Browse photographs of western honey bee across habitat, behavior, anatomy, and life stages.
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Core article
A closer look at habitat, diet, behavior, reproduction, and conservation.
The western honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a social insect found in meadows, forests, farms, and managed hives worldwide. Colonies contain tens of thousands of workers, a queen, and seasonally produced males. While collecting nectar and pollen, honeybees pollinate wild plants and crops.
The honeybee is small — 0.4 to 0.8 inches — but robustly built, its body covered in dense, branched hairs that trap pollen. The head is a sensory command center, with two large compound eyes of thousands of lenses (able to read polarized light for navigation even under cloud), three simple eyes for light intensity, and whip-like antennae that detect floral scents and pheromones. The thorax anchors the wings and three pairs of legs, and the worker's hind legs carry the corbicula, or "pollen basket," a concave, hair-fringed structure for hauling large pollen loads; powerful flight muscles beat the wings about 200 times a second. The abdomen holds the "honey stomach" (crop) for carrying nectar, wax glands for building comb, and, in females, a stinger. It belongs to the family Apidae, genus Apis; bees evolved from predatory wasps around 120 million years ago, turning to nectar and pollen as flowering plants radiated.
Originally native to Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia, Apis mellifera now lives on every continent except Antarctica through human introduction and beekeeping. It occupies temperate forest, grassland, tropical savanna, and some desert areas where water and flowering plants are available. Wild colonies use enclosed cavities such as hollow trees, rock crevices, and caves, while many colonies live in managed apiaries near crops.
Honeybees are strict herbivores living entirely on flowers, foraging two things: nectar and pollen. Nectar, a sugary fluid, is their carbohydrate and energy source — workers draw it up with a straw-like proboscis into the honey stomach, then back at the hive regurgitate and pass it between bees into wax cells and fan it with their wings until the water drops below about 18% and it becomes stable honey, capped with wax as a winter reserve. Pollen is the protein and fat source for rearing young: foragers pack it into their pollen baskets, and at the hive it is mixed with nectar and secretions into fermented "bee bread" fed to larvae. Moving flower to flower for this food, bees inadvertently transfer pollen and pollinate the plants.
A honeybee colony is a eusocial superorganism of 20,000 to 80,000 in three castes. The single queen is the colony's only reproductive female, laying up to 2,000 eggs a day and ruling not by force but through pheromones that suppress other females' reproduction and hold the hive together. Workers — sterile females, 99% of the colony — take roles by age: young nurses feed larvae and clean, then bees build wax comb, then guard the entrance, and finally forage outside in their last weeks. Drones, the few males, have no sting and do no work; their sole role is to fly to congregation areas and mate with virgin queens, dying in the act. The signature behavior is the "waggle dance": a returning forager performs precise figure-eights on the vertical comb to tell her sisters the exact distance, direction (relative to the sun), and quality of a flower patch.
Honeybees undergo complete metamorphosis. The queen lays a single egg in a wax cell; after three days it hatches into a blind, legless larva. All larvae get nutrient-rich "royal jelly" at first, then workers and drones switch to bee bread while a future queen is fed royal jelly exclusively, triggering her reproductive development. The larva grows, spins a cocoon, and is capped in to pupate, emerging as an adult after about 21 days for a worker (16 for a queen, 24 for a drone). A summer worker's life is short and brutal — often just 6 weeks of frantic foraging — though winter workers survive 4 to 9 months, and a healthy queen can live 3 to 5 years.
Officially Apis mellifera is Least Concern thanks to its vast managed presence, but that hides a real crisis in pollinator health. The biggest biological threat is the invasive Varroa destructor mite, which feeds on bees and transmits devastating viruses that can wipe out hives. On top of it comes human stress: pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, act as neurotoxins that impair navigation, foraging, and immunity; industrial monoculture erases diverse flowers and starves bees; and habitat loss and climate change shift the timing of blooms. Protecting honeybees means shifting toward sustainable, lower-pesticide farming and restoring diverse native floral habitat.
Kingdom
Animalia
Phylum
Arthropoda
Class
Order
Hymenoptera
Family
Apidae
Genus
Apis
Species
A. mellifera
A single worker honey bee makes only about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime.
Honey bees communicate the direction and distance of flowers to other bees by doing a 'waggle dance'.
A queen bee is the only female that can lay eggs, and she can lay her own weight in eggs every day!
Honey bees fly at about 15 miles (24 km) per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second.
Honey bees are the only insects that produce food eaten by humans—honey!
Honey never spoils! Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are thousands of years old and still safe to eat.
Select a question to reveal the answer.
Bees collect sweet nectar from flowers, swallow it, and carry it back to their hive. They spit it into wax cells and fan it with their wings to make it thick and sweet.
A colony has three types of bees: one Queen who lays eggs, thousands of female Workers who do all the chores, and a few male Drones who fertilize new queens.
Worker bees perform a special 'waggle dance' inside the hive to tell other bees exactly where to find the best patches of flowers.
No. Male drone bees cannot sting at all. Female worker bees have stingers to defend the hive, but they will only sting if they feel threatened.
Honey bees are super pollinators. By visiting flowers for food, they help plants grow fruits, nuts, and vegetables, which humans and other animals eat.
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