Every honey bee worker on Earth is functionally sterile, laying only unfertilized eggs that develop into drones, with one genuine exception: the Cape honey bee of South Africa, whose worker bees carry a rare genetic quirk letting them produce fully…
At the opposite end of the size spectrum from the giant honey bee already covered on this site sits the dwarf honey bee, the smallest recognized honey bee species in the world, building a delicate single comb barely larger than…
The largest honey bee species on Earth doesn’t live in a hive at all, in the sense any Western beekeeper would recognize: it builds a single massive comb hanging fully exposed in open air, often dozens of feet up a…
Long before Varroa Sensitive Hygiene became a household term among mite-resistant breeding programs, a University of Minnesota researcher was already selectively breeding bees for a broader, related trait using nothing more sophisticated than liquid nitrogen and a stopwatch. Minnesota Hygienic…
In the alfalfa seed-growing regions of Washington and Idaho, some farmers maintain something most beekeepers have never heard of: a deliberately engineered patch of salty, compacted soil called a “bee bed,” home to millions of individual native bee nests packed…
Look closely at a cluster of bees seemingly asleep on a wilted flower stem in the early morning, antennae draped well past their own body length, and there’s a good chance you’ve found a group of male long-horned bees, one…
Few native bees have a nesting behavior quite as genuinely unusual as plasterer bees, which line the inside of their underground nest cells with a smooth, waterproof secretion that dries into something scientists have literally compared to plastic wrap or…
Despite sharing a name with the large, wood-boring bee already covered on this site, small carpenter bees are a genuinely different insect with an entirely different, far less concerning nesting habit: rather than drilling into solid house siding or deck…
A fast, loudly buzzing bee that looks convincingly like a small bumblebee but disappears into a hole in a bare patch of sloped soil rather than a colony nest is very likely a digger bee, one of North America’s most…