Honey bee

Honey bees Temporal range: Oligocene–Recent PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N
Western honey bee carrying pollen back to the hive
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Insecta
Order:	Hymenoptera
Family:	Apidae
Subfamily:	Apinae
Tribe:	Apini Latreille, 1802
Genus:	Apis Linnaeus, 1758
Species
Apis lithohermaea (†) Apis nearctica (†) Subgenus Micrapis: Apis andreniformis Apis florea Subgenus Megapis: Apis dorsata Subgenus Apis: Apis cerana Apis koschevnikovi Apis mellifera Apis nigrocincta

A honey bee (or honeybee) is any bee that is a member of the genus Apis. They are all eusocial flying insects which live in colonies of various sizes.

They are only a small fraction of the 20,000 known species of bee. They produce and store honey and make perennial, colonial nests from wax. There are both stinging and stingless honey bees.

Honey bees are the only living members of the tribe Apini, all in the genus Apis. There are only seven species of honey bee, with a total of 44 subspecies.^[1] Historically, from six to eleven species have been recognized.

Some other types of bees produce and store honey, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. The study of honey bees is known as ''melittology''.

The first Apis bees appear in the European fossil record at the Eocene–Oligocene boundary (34 million years ago). This shows 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.

No Apis species existed in the New World during human times before the introduction of A. mellifera by Europeans. Only one fossil species is known, a single 14-million-year-old specimen from Nevada.^[2]

The close relatives of modern honey bees – bumblebees and stingless bees – are also social, but with smaller numbers in their families.

All honey bees (and perhaps all bees) use scent as a way to co-ordinate their activities. Nasonov's gland produces a pheromone used to get worker bees together.^[3] The pheromone can attract workers to a settled swarm and draw bees who have lost their way back to the hive.

1. ↑ Engel, Michael S. 1999. "The taxonomy of recent and fossil honey bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Apis)". Journal of Hymenoptera Research. 8: 165–196.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
2. ↑ Michael S. Engel; et al. (2009). "A honey bee from the Miocene of Nevada and the biogeography of Apis (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Apini)". Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences. 60 (3): 23–38.
3. ↑ Zoubaref A.; Benton, Frank, trans. 1883. Concerning an organ of the bee not yet described. The British Bee Journal 11: 296–297.