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Portrait of Honey bee

Science · Biology

Honey bee

Biology — insects, eusociality and animal communication

Honey bees are eusocial insects of the genus Apis, best known through the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, kept for honey and pollination on every inhabited continent. A colony is a single fertile queen, a few hundred seasonal males and tens of thousands of sterile female workers who pass through a fixed sequence of jobs from nurse to guard to forager. Their most celebrated behaviour is the waggle dance, decoded by Karl von Frisch: a returning forager runs a figure of eight on the vertical comb, and the angle of the straight waggling run from vertical encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun while the run's duration encodes the distance. It is the only well-established symbolic communication system outside the primates, and it won von Frisch a share of the Nobel Prize in 1973.

How to spot them

  • ▸A figure-of-eight dance on the vertical comb that tells hivemates where to fly
  • ▸One fertile queen, tens of thousands of sterile daughters, and a few hundred short-lived males
  • ▸Males develop from unfertilised eggs and have no father
  • ▸A barbed sting that tears free and kills the worker who uses it
  • ▸Decoded by Karl von Frisch, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Key facts

The waggle dance: a figure-of-eight run on the vertical comb that tells hivemates where to fly

The angle of the straight run from vertical gives the direction relative to the sun; its duration gives the distance

Karl von Frisch decoded its dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Lorenz and Tinbergen (1973)

The first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine given for animal behaviour

A circular dance signals food close to the hive; the figure-of-eight signals a longer flight

The switch between the two comes at roughly 50–100 m, varying by subspecies

Its males hatch from unfertilised eggs and so have a mother but no father (1845)

Haplodiploidy, worked out by the Silesian apiarist Johann Dzierzon

A worker's barbed sting tears free from her abdomen and kills her; the queen's is smooth

The detached sting keeps pumping venom, which is why it should be scraped off rather than pinched

A diet of royal jelly turns a genetically ordinary female larva into a queen

An epigenetic switch, not a difference in genes

Its Linnaean species name means 'honey-bearing', which Linnaeus later tried and failed to correct (1758)

He proposed mellifica, 'honey-making', in 1761, but the earlier name has priority

Key ideas

  • The dance is a true symbolic code: it refers to a place that is out of sight, in an arbitrary mapping of angle-from-vertical onto angle-from-the-sun. Adrian Wenner argued through the 1960s and 70s that recruits were following scent instead, and the question was settled by Axel Michelsen's mechanical dancing bee in 1989, which recruited foragers to sites it named.
  • Haplodiploidy makes full sisters share on average three-quarters of their genes, rather than a half, which W. D. Hamilton argued helps explain why sterile female workers rear sisters instead of daughters.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758, the western or European honey bee; the genus Apis has around seven to twelve species, including the eastern Apis cerana
  • •Family Apidae, order Hymenoptera, with the ants, wasps and sawflies
  • •A summer colony holds perhaps 20,000–60,000 workers, a few hundred drones and one queen
  • •The queen mates once, on one or more nuptial flights with a dozen or more drones, storing sperm for life, and can lay up to about 2,000 eggs a day
  • •A summer worker lives about six weeks and produces on the order of a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime
  • •Comb cells are hexagonal, built of wax secreted from glands on the workers' abdomens; the hexagon is the most economical tiling of the plane by equal areas
  • •Bees see ultraviolet but not red, and navigate by the pattern of polarised light in the sky when the sun is hidden
  • •Drones die in the act of mating, and surviving drones are expelled from the hive before winter
  • •The genome was sequenced in 2006; the same decade brought the alarm over Colony Collapse Disorder and the parasitic mite Varroa destructor
  • •Common misconception: the waggle dance is performed in the dark, inside the hive, and is read by touch and vibration rather than sight

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