Western Honey Bee

Apis mellifera

Western Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) is a species in the genus Apis, family Apidae, order Hymenoptera.

Scientific classification

Description

The western honey bee is a eusocial insect living in perennial colonies of typically 10,000–60,000 individuals: one reproductive queen, a seasonal population of male drones, and a large majority of non-reproductive female workers. Workers pass through a sequence of roles with age — cleaning, nursing, building, guarding, and finally foraging — rather than being assigned a job for life.

The waggle dance

A returning forager communicates the location of a resource by dancing on the vertical comb. The angle of the dance's straight run relative to gravity encodes the direction of the target relative to the sun; the duration of the run encodes distance. Karl von Frisch's decoding of this in the 1940s remains one of the few demonstrations of symbolic communication in an invertebrate, and earned a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Pollination

Honey bees are managed worldwide for pollination and for honey, wax and propolis. Their agricultural importance is real but often overstated relative to wild pollinators: many crops are pollinated more effectively by solitary bees, and introduced honey bees can compete with native species. Colony losses — including the pattern labelled colony collapse disorder — are generally attributed to an interaction of the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, associated viruses, pesticide exposure and nutritional stress rather than to any single cause.

References

• von Frisch, K. (1967). The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Harvard University Press.
• Seeley, T. D. (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press.