Honey Bees

Africanized honey bees are fuzzy and brownish in color. They look like their Italian counterparts, making it tough to know if a hive has been taken over by Africanized genetics.

Africanized honey bees are actually a hybrid. They were created in Brazil by crossing the African bee with Italian bees in the 1950s to increase honey production.

In 1957, 26 of these experimental swarms escaped quarantine and quickly took over South Ameri ...

Buckfast Honey Bees are a hybrid, developed by Karl Kehrle, also known as Brother Adam Adam (1898-1996), who was in charge of beekeeping from 1919 at Buckfast Abbey in Devon in the United Kingdom, where the bees are still bred today.

These bees are extremely gentle and highly productive. They have a strong resistance to tracheal mites and good hygienic behavior. However, they are known to be defensive sometimes; not that ...

Carniolan Honey Bees (Apis mellifera carnica) are a subspecies of the Western Honey Bee. They are naive to Slovenia, southern Austria, and parts of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.

They are favored among beekeepers for several reasons, not the least being its ability to defend itself successfullyagainst insect pests while at the same time being extremely gentle in their behavior toward beekeepers. Th ...

Caucasian Honey Bees (Apis mellifera caucasca) originated from the high valleys of the Central Caucasus. Georgia is the central homeland for the subspecies, although the bees also can be found in Eastern Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

They have a long history of importance to beekeeping worldwide. They were first introduced in the United States in 19th century. The Russian Revolution and consequent annexation of Georgia by Red Army ...

Cordovan Honey Bees are a subset of Italian bees with more yellow coloring. They are also gentler than their Italian cousins and slightly more likely to rob. They are quite striking to observe, with bright yellow bodies and a lack of stripes. They are rarely available in a package of bees, unlike Italians, so are often considered wilder.  

It is not clear what caused the Cordovan Bees to veer off from Italian strains and become ...

German Dark Bee, also known as The European Dark Bee, was brought from Northern Eurasia in the colonial era. This subspecies has since then been segmented further into sub races of German Bees due to their hardiness. They are able to survive long, cold winters more often than other strains of honey bees. However, due to their defensive nature and susceptibility to brood diseases like American and European foulbrood, this stock has lost sign ...

Italian honey bees (Apis mellifera ligustica) are thought to have been originated from the continental part of Italy, south of the Alps, and north of Sicily. The subspecies may have survived the last Ice Age in Italy. They are genetically a different subspecies than that from the Iberian Peninsula and from Sicily. They are the most widely distributed of all honey bees, and have proven adaptable to most climates from subtropical to cool temperate, ...

Minnesota Hygienic Honey Bees: A Hopeful Buzz in Beekeeping

Honey bees, vital pollinators and honey producers, face a multitude of threats. One ray of hope comes in the form of the Minnesota Hygienic Honey Bee, a bee variety bred specifically for disease resistance and natural mite detection.

Born from Decades of Research
The Minnesota Hygienic Bee is the brainchild of Dr. Marla Spivak and her team at the Universi ...

Russian Honey Bee refers to honey bees (Apis mellifera) originated in the Primorsky Krai region of Russia. This strain of bee was imported into the United States in 1997 by the USDAs Honeybee Breeding, Genetics an Physiology Laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in response to severe declines in bee populations caused by infestations of parasitic mites. Since then they have been used in breeding programs to improve existing honeybee stock. < ...

Western Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) - also known as European Honey Bees - are the most common species of honey bee worldwide.

They were one of the first domesticated insects, and they are the primary species maintained by beekeepers to this day for both its honey production and pollination activities. With human assistance, the western honey bee now occupies every continent except Antarctica. Because of its wide cultivation, this ...