Honey bee
A honey bee is a eusocial flying insect from the genus Apis of the largest bee family, Apidae. Honey bees are known for their construction of perennial nests within cavities containing hexagonal cells made of secreted wax, their large colony sizes, and their routine regurgitation of digested carbohydrates as surplus food storage in the form of honey, the lattermost of which distinguishes their hives as a prized foraging target of many mellivorous animals including honey badgers, bears and human hunter-gatherers.
Although honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees, they are the bee clade most familiar to humans and are also the most valuable beneficial insects to agriculture and horticulture. The best-known honey bee species is the western honey bee, which was domesticated and farmed for honey production and crop pollination. The only other domesticated species is the eastern honey bee, which are raised in South, Southeast and East Asia.
Only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees, but some other bee species also produce and store honey and have been kept by humans for that purpose, including the stingless bees belonging to the genus Melipona and the Indian stingless or dammar bee Tetragonula iridipennis. In addition to harvesting honey, modern humans also use beeswax in making candles, soap, lip balms and various cosmetics, as a lubricant and in mould-making using the lost wax process. Other honey bee secretions such as royal jelly and bee venom are used pharmaceutically, especially in alternative medicine.
Etymology and name
The genus name Apis is Latin for "bee". Although modern dictionaries may refer to Apis as either honey bee or honeybee, entomologist Robert Snodgrass asserts that correct usage requires two words, i.e., honey bee, because it is a kind or type of bee. It is incorrect to run the two words together, as in dragonfly or butterfly, which are appropriate because dragonflies and butterflies are not flies. Honey bee, not honeybee, is the listed common name in the Integrated Taxonomic Information System, the Entomological Society of America Common Names of Insects Database, and the Tree of Life Web Project.Origin, systematics, and distribution
All honey bees are nectarivorous pollinators native to mainland Afro-Eurasia, but human migrations and colonizations to the New World since the Age of Discovery have been responsible for the introduction of multiple subspecies of the western honey bee into South America, North America and Australia, resulting in the current cosmopolitan distribution of honey bees in all continents except Antarctica.Honey bees appear to have their center of origin in South and Southeast Asia, as all the extant species except Apis mellifera are native to that region. Notably, living representatives of the earliest lineages to diverge have their center of origin there.
The first Apis bees appear in the fossil record at the Eocene–Oligocene boundary, in European deposits. The origin of these prehistoric honey bees does not necessarily indicate Europe as the place of origin of the genus, only that the bees were present in Europe by that time. Few fossil deposits are known from South Asia, the suspected region of honey bee origin, and fewer still have been thoroughly studied.
No Apis species existed in the New World during human times before the introduction of A. mellifera by Europeans. Only one fossil species is documented from the New World, Apis nearctica, known from a single 14 million-year-old specimen from Nevada.
The close relatives of modern honey bees—e.g., bumblebees and stingless bees—are also social to some degree, and social behavior is considered to be a trait that predates the origin of the genus. Among the extant members of Apis, the more basal species make single, exposed combs, while the more recently evolved species nest in cavities and have multiple combs, which has greatly facilitated their domestication.
Species
While about 20,000 species of bees exist, only eight extant species of honey bee are recognized, with a total of 43 subspecies, although historically seven to 11 species are recognized: Apis andreniformis ; Apis cerana ; Apis dorsata ; Apis florea ; Apis koschevnikovi ; Apis laboriosa ; Apis mellifera ; and Apis nigrocincta.Honey bees are the only extant members of the tribe Apini. Today's honey bees constitute three clades: Micrapis, Megapis, and Apis.
Most species have historically been cultured or at least exploited for honey and beeswax by humans indigenous to their native ranges. Only two species have been truly domesticated: Apis mellifera and Apis cerana. A. mellifera has been cultivated at least since the time of the building of the Egyptian pyramids, and only that species has been moved extensively beyond its native range.
''Micrapis''
Apis florea and Apis andreniformis are small honey bees of southern and southeastern Asia. They make very small, exposed nests in trees and shrubs. Their stings are often incapable of penetrating human skin, so the hive and swarms can be handled with minimal protection. They occur largely sympatrically, though they are very distinct evolutionarily and are probably the result of allopatric speciation, their distribution later converging.Given that A. florea is more widely distributed and A. andreniformis is considerably more aggressive, honey is, if at all, usually harvested from the former only. They are the earliest-diverging extant lineage of honey bees. Apis florea have smaller wing spans than its sister species. Apis florea are also completely yellow except the scutellum of workers, which is black.
''Megapis''
Two species are recognized in the subgenus Megapis. They usually build single or a few exposed combs on high tree limbs, on cliffs, and sometimes on buildings. They can be very fierce. Periodically robbed of their honey by human "honey hunters", colonies are easily capable of stinging a human being to death if provoked.- Apis dorsata, the giant honey bee, is native and widespread across most of South and Southeast Asia.
- *A. d. binghami, the Indonesian giant honey bee, is classified as the Indonesian subspecies of the giant honey bee or a distinct species; in the latter case, A. d. breviligula and/or other lineages would probably also have to be considered species.
- Apis laboriosa, the Himalayan giant honey bee, was initially described as a distinct species. Later, it was included in A. dorsata as a subspecies based on the biological species concept, though authors applying a genetic species concept have suggested it should be considered a separate species and more recent research has confirmed this classification. Essentially restricted to the Himalayas, it differs little from the giant honey bee in appearance but has extensive behavioral adaptations that enable it to nest in the open at high altitudes despite low ambient temperatures. It is the largest living honey bee.
''Apis''
Koschevnikov's honey bee
Koschevnikov's honey bee is often referred to in the literature as the "red bee of Sabah"; however, A. koschevnikovi is pale reddish in Sabah State, Borneo, Malaysia, but a dark, coppery colour in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, Indonesia. Its habitat is limited to the tropical evergreen forests of the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra and they do not live in tropical evergreen rain forests which extend into Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam.Philippine honey bee
Apis nigrocincta is a cavity-nesting species. The species has rust-coloured scapes, legs, and clypeuses, with reddish-tan hair colour that covers most of the body.Eastern honey bee
Apis cerana, the eastern honey bee proper, is the traditional honey bee of southern and eastern Asia. One of its subspecies, the Indian honey bee, was domesticated and kept in hives in a fashion similar to A. mellifera, though on a more limited, regional scale.It has not been possible yet to resolve its relationship to the Bornean honey bee A. c. nuluensis and Apis nigrocincta from the Philippines to satisfaction; some researchers argue that these are indeed distinct species, but that A. cerana as defined is still paraphyletic, consisting of several separate species, though other researchers argue cerana is a single monophyletic species.
Western honey bee
A. mellifera, the most common domesticated species, was first domesticated before 2600 BC and was the third insect to have its genome mapped. It seems to have originated in eastern tropical Africa and spread from there to Europe and eastwards into Asia to the Tian Shan range. It is variously called the European, western, or common honey bee in different parts of the world. Many subspecies have adapted to the local geographic and climatic environments; in addition, breeds such as the Buckfast bee have been bred. Behavior, colour, and anatomy can be quite different from one subspecies or even strain to another.A. mellifera phylogeny is the most enigmatic of all honey bee species. It seems to have diverged from its eastern relatives only during the Late Miocene. This would fit the hypothesis that the ancestral stock of cave-nesting honey bees was separated into the western group of East Africa and the eastern group of tropical Asia by desertification in the Middle East and adjacent regions, which caused declines of food plants and trees that provided nest sites, eventually causing gene flow to cease.
The diversity of A. mellifera subspecies is probably the product of a largely Early Pleistocene radiation aided by climate and habitat changes during the last ice age. That the western honey bee has been intensively managed by humans for many millennia—including hybridization and introductions—has apparently increased the speed of its evolution and confounded the DNA sequence data to a point where little of substance can be said about the exact relationships of many A. mellifera subspecies.
Apis mellifera is not native to the Americas, so it was not present when the European explorers and colonists arrived. However, other native bee species were kept and traded by indigenous peoples. In 1622, European colonists brought the German honey bee to the Americas first, followed later by the Italian honey bee and others. Many of the crops that depend on western honey bees for pollination have also been imported since colonial times. Escaped swarms spread rapidly as far as the Great Plains, usually preceding the colonists. Honey bees did not naturally cross the Rocky Mountains; they were transported by the Mormon pioneers to Utah in the late 1840s, and by ship to California in the early 1850s.