European Honey Bee — Fact Sheet

Scientific name: Apis mellifera (Linnaeus, 1758) Common names: European honey bee, Western honey bee, honeybee Family: Apidae Status in the San Antonio / Boerne corridor: Naturalized, year-round, common

At a glance

Identification

Honey bees are stocky, fuzzy, and amber-colored, with the classic "bee" shape people picture when they hear the word. Their hind legs carry visible yellow-to-orange pollen loads when returning to the nest (packed into structures called corbiculae, or pollen baskets).

The most common identification mistake is confusing a honey bee with a yellowjacket. The tell: honey bees are fuzzy, yellowjackets are sleek and shiny. Honey bees are also rounder-bodied and fly more slowly and methodically than a yellowjacket's sharp, hovering, dive-at-your-sandwich flight.

Three castes live together in the colony:

• Workers — sterile females, the bees you see on flowers. They do literally everything except lay eggs and mate.
• Drones — males. Larger, with enormous eyes that cover the entire top of the head. Drones cannot sting.
• Queen — the single reproductive female, longer-bodied than workers, with a much larger abdomen.

Biology and behavior

The colony

A single queen heads each colony. She lays around 1,500 eggs per day at peak, and can exceed 2,000 per day during strong spring build-up. Over her lifetime she will lay hundreds of thousands of eggs, and every other bee in the colony is her offspring.

Workers go through a well-documented career progression as they age. A new worker starts as a cell cleaner, moves on to nursing the brood, then to building comb, then storing and processing nectar, then guarding the entrance, and only in the last 2–3 weeks of her life does she become a forager. It is estimated that a single worker bee may perform up to 90 different tasks in its lifetime.

Worker lifespan varies dramatically with season. A summer worker typically lives 5–6 weeks — she literally wears out. A "winter bee" reared in the fall has different physiology and can live 4–6 months, carrying the colony through to spring. Queens live 1–5 years depending on conditions, though commercial beekeepers typically requeen every 1–2 years for productivity.

Drones: the short, strange life of a male bee

Drones do no work. They do not forage, do not build, do not guard, do not clean, and they cannot sting (their "stinger" would be a modified ovipositor — an egg-laying structure — which males do not have). Their one and only purpose is to mate with a virgin queen from another colony.

This story does not end well for the drone. Mating happens mid-air at drone congregation areas, typically 60–300 feet up. When a drone successfully mates with a queen, his reproductive organ — which is barbed, like a worker's stinger — tears off inside her along with a portion of his abdomen. He drops out of the sky and dies within minutes.

The drones that don't mate don't fare much better. When fall arrives and nectar flow ends, the female workers stop feeding them, drag them to the entrance, and expel them from the hive. Evicted drones die of starvation and exposure within days. No drones survive the winter.

The waggle dance

This is the famous one, and it is every bit as remarkable as the legend suggests. When a forager finds a rich food source, she returns to the nest and performs a figure-8 dance on the vertical face of the comb. The dance communicates two pieces of information with surprising precision:

• Direction — the angle of the waggle run relative to vertical corresponds to the angle of the food source relative to the sun. A waggle run pointed straight up means "fly toward the sun." A 45-degree angle to the left of vertical means "fly 45 degrees to the left of the sun."
• Distance — the duration of the waggling portion of the run corresponds to how far the food is. Longer waggle = farther flight.

Karl von Frisch decoded this system in the mid-20th century and received the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the work. What's wild is that research published in PLOS Biology in 2007 showed dancing bees also release specific chemical compounds (alkanes and alkenes — tricosane, pentacosane, and their Z-9 alkene variants) from their abdomens during the dance, which helps recruit nestmates to exit the hive and join the forage. The dance isn't just motion — it's chemistry too.

The hive is an active climate system

Honey bees maintain their brood nest at approximately 95°F (35°C) year-round. When it's too hot, workers collect water and fan their wings at the entrance to evaporatively cool the hive — a process identical in principle to an evaporative cooler. When it's too cold, workers cluster around the brood and vibrate their flight muscles to generate heat. A well-insulated cluster can keep the core of the hive warm even when the air temperature outside is well below freezing.

Food supply

Honey bees are famous for their signature product — honey is concentrated nectar that workers dehydrate by fanning until the water content drops to about 17%, at which point it won't ferment and keeps essentially forever. They also produce beeswax from glands on the underside of the abdomen (a rite of passage for young workers) and propolis, a resin-based "bee glue" gathered from tree buds that they use to seal cracks and as an antimicrobial nest coating.

A single foraging trip collects nectar from 100 to 1,500 flowers and lasts 30–60 minutes. A healthy colony may make tens of thousands of foraging trips per day during a strong nectar flow.

Local context — San Antonio and the Hill Country

Honey bees are not native to the Americas. They were brought by European colonists starting in the 1600s, and feral populations spread across the continent behind the settlement frontier. Native Americans in some regions called them "white man's flies" because their westward advance predicted European arrival.

In the San Antonio area, honey bees are active every month of the year — there is no true dormant season the way there is in colder climates. This matters because it means a structural honey bee colony in a wall void or attic is a year-round problem, not something that "goes away in winter."

Swarm season here peaks March through June, with a smaller secondary swarm pulse in September after fall nectar flow. In an average Hill Country spring, a healthy colony will throw off one to three swarms — the old queen leaves with about half the workers to find a new nest site, while a new queen takes over the original colony.

In the corridor from San Antonio through Boerne, Leon Springs, Fair Oaks Ranch, and into Kerrville, the preferred natural cavity is the hollow of a mature live oak. On residential properties, the most frequent structural cavities we encounter are wall voids behind stone or stucco, soffit returns, chimney flues, and water meter boxes. Meter boxes specifically are a signature issue — CPS Energy and San Antonio Water System readers encounter occupied bee colonies in meter boxes regularly during spring swarm season.

Important caveat for Central Texas: essentially every feral honey bee colony south of roughly the Austin line now carries Africanized genetics (see separate Africanized Honey Bee fact sheet). Managed, beekeeper-sourced colonies behave like traditional European honey bees. Colonies you find wild in a wall, tree, or meter box should be treated as potentially defensive.

Risk to humans and pets

Low to moderate in normal circumstances, high if the colony is Africanized or if the subject is allergic.

A single honey bee sting injects about 50–140 micrograms of venom. For most people, a few stings cause localized pain and swelling that resolves in 24–48 hours. Approximately 1–3% of the population has a systemic allergy to bee venom; severe anaphylaxis can develop within minutes of a sting and is a medical emergency.

The barbed stinger remains in the skin after a worker bee stings, continuing to pump venom for 30–60 seconds. Fast removal reduces the dose — scrape it off with a fingernail or credit card rather than pinching it out, which squeezes more venom in.

Structural concerns

A colony in a wall is not just a sting risk; it is a building-damage problem on a longer timeline. A large, established colony will accumulate 40–80 pounds of honeycomb inside a cavity. If the bees are killed without removing the comb:

1. The wax comb warms and softens without bees to cool it 2. Unguarded honey attracts small hive beetles, wax moths, ants, roaches, and rodents 3. Honey melts down through wall cavities and leaks through drywall, staining ceilings and interior surfaces 4. The "bee smell" left in the void attracts new swarms year after year

This is why every complete honey bee removal requires opening the cavity, removing the comb, cleaning the space, and sealing entry points. "Just spray them" is not a complete job on a structural colony.

Odd, funny, and genuinely true

• Honey bees have five eyes. Two large compound eyes you'd expect, plus three small simple eyes (ocelli) arranged in a triangle on top of the head that detect light intensity for navigation.
• Drones (males) have no father, but they do have a grandfather. Honey bees are haplodiploid: unfertilized eggs become drones (with half the chromosomes), fertilized eggs become females. A drone comes from an unfertilized egg, so he has only a mother. But his mother had a father, so he has a grandfather. Genetics majors find this confusing.
• Archaeologists have recovered edible honey from Egyptian tombs sealed over 3,000 years ago. Honey's combination of low moisture content, low pH, and trace hydrogen peroxide from bee-produced enzymes makes it one of the most microbially hostile foods on Earth.
• The queen bee has a stinger, but it isn't barbed like a worker's. She can sting repeatedly without dying. She almost never uses it on humans — she reserves it for rival queens inside the hive, where queen-on-queen combat is how new queens establish dominance.
• Honey bees recognize human faces under laboratory conditions. Trained with sugar-water rewards, they can distinguish individual human faces from photographs — not a skill evolved for any purpose in nature, but a byproduct of their impressive pattern-recognition abilities for flowers.
• Research published in 2002 showed elephants are afraid of honey bees. Playback recordings of disturbed African honey bee colonies cause elephants to walk or run away from the sound. Some African farmers now ring their crops with "beehive fences" to deter elephant crop raids — a conservation solution that also produces honey.
• A honey bee will fly, in total, about 500 miles in her lifetime as a forager — and she will produce roughly 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in that entire life. Every teaspoon on your toast represents the full foraging career of about twelve bees.
• Most of North America's large-scale honey bee pollination happens via semi-truck. Nearly every almond in California is pollinated by hives that were, a month earlier, in Texas, Florida, or the Dakotas. About 1.5 million hives are trucked into California each February for almond bloom. It's the largest managed-pollination event on the planet.
• Bees sleep. Foragers rest at night in a posture similar to mammalian sleep, with antennae drooping and body temperature dropping. Sleep-deprived bees dance less accurately the next day, communicating food locations with worse precision — the first known example of an insect whose cognitive performance measurably degrades without sleep.

FAQ hooks (for LuperIQ / SEO)

• Will you kill the bees?
• Are these Africanized?
• How much does bee removal cost?
• Do I have to remove the honeycomb?
• Why are there bees in my wall?
• How do I get rid of bees in my chimney?
• When is bee swarm season in Texas?
• Is it safe to live with bees in my walls?

Sources consulted for this fact sheet include peer-reviewed work on honey bee communication (Sheehan & Tibbetts, PLOS Biology on waggle dance chemistry), USDA and university extension publications, and primary behavioral research on caste biology and colony structure. Seasonal timing reflects documented Central Texas patterns.