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. It is incorrect to run the two words together, as in dragonfly or butterfly, which are appropriate because dragonflies and butterflies are not flies and have no connection with dragons or butter. 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. 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.

Only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees, but some other types of bees 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. The only other domesticated bee is the eastern honey bee ( Apis cerana), which occurs in South, Southeast, and East Asia. The best known honey bee is the western honey bee, ( Apis mellifera), which was domesticated for honey production and crop pollination. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees. Only 8 surviving species of honey bee are recognized, with a total of 43 subspecies, though historically 7 to 11 species are recognized. Honey bees are known for their construction of perennial colonial nests from wax, the large size of their colonies, and surplus production and storage of honey, distinguishing their hives as a prized foraging target of many animals, including honey badgers, bears and human hunter-gatherers. After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current cosmopolitan distribution of honey bees, introducing multiple subspecies into South America (early 16th century), North America (early 17th century), and Australia (early 19th century).

Queens not only sting other active queens, but they also – believe it or not – sting the developing queen pupae inside of queen cells! Queens are so hostile towards each other that a mature queen will poke her stinger right through the outside casing of a mature queen cell in order to kill the undeveloped future queen inside the cell.A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect within the genus Apis of the bee clade, all native to mainland Afro-Eurasia. When a queen bee attacks another queen, it is her stinger that delivers the deathblow. In such a fight, a queen’s stinger serves as her primary weapon. When a queen encounters another queen, the result is often a fight-to-the-death. Because queen honeybees rarely tolerate other queen bees within their midst, they need a way to attack them with force. So, what is the point of the queen bee’s stinger? Her stinger is reserved as a weapon to use against other queens. This is unlike what happens to a worker bee, which loses her stinger and dies in the process of stinging. Given that a queen bee’s stinger is smooth, this means that she can theoretically sting multiple times without losing her stinger and dying in the process. This could be that because, unlike a worker bee, a queen bee’s stinger is smooth and not barbed. In the miniscule times where it has been reported that a queen actually has stung a person, we have heard that the sting is not as painful to a person as that of a worker bee. Our colleagues and friends from other queen producing companies report the same queens, whatever their genetics, simply don’t sting humans. Instead, our queens seem to maintain a peaceful and graceful quality. As uncomfortable as it must be for the queens to endure this, they never take it out on our team by stinging us. Queen bees, however, almost never sting people they reserve their stinging for other queen bees.Īt Wildflower Meadows, we hold, mark and cage tens of thousands of queens each year. Every queen bee has a stinger, and is fully capable of using it.

Does a drone bee sting