Eastern honey bee
The eastern honey bee is the honey bee of Asia. It looks a lot like the honey bee we know in Europe, but it is a different kind. It lives in big, busy families and builds its wax combs inside hollow spaces with a small door.
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Fun facts
Its family is quite small for a honey bee, with about 6,000 to 7,000 workers. A European honey bee family can have 50,000 or more.
It builds several wax combs next to each other inside a hollow, like a tree hole.
The small door of its nest makes it easier to guard against bees from other nests.
For a long time people thought it was the same kind as the European honey bee, but the two cannot have babies together.
There are many kinds of it in different places, like the Japanese honey bee and the Himalayan honey bee.
Most asked questions about Eastern honey bee
?How big is an eastern honey bee?
It is about 10 to 11 millimetres long, about as long as a fingernail is wide.
?Does the eastern honey bee make honey?
Yes. It collects nectar from flowers and makes honey, just like the European honey bee.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Apis cerana
- Named by
- Fabricius, 1793
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Apidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Apidae
- Lives on
- Asia
- Also known as
- Asiatic honey bee, Asian honey bee, Indian honey bee
Where the facts come from
- Apis cerana (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Rushenb. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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