science

Honey bee race

Honey bee race is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Honey bee race rather than just read about it. In short: Within biological taxonomy, a honey bee race would be an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy, below the level of subspecies. It has been used as a higher rank than strain, with several strains making up one race.

Key takeaways

Honey bee race belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Honey bee race to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Honey bee race from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Within biological taxonomy, a honey bee race would be an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy, below the level of subspecies. It has been used as a higher rank than strain, with several strains making up one race. Therefore, a strain (within the honey bee context) is a lower-level taxonomic rank used at the intraspecific level within a race of a subspecies. Strains are often seen as inherently artificial concepts, more usually within biology as characterized by a specific intent for genetic isolation, however, within beekeeping circles, strain is more likely to be used to describe very minor differences throughout the same subspecies, such as the color ranges of A. m. carnica from brown to grey. Within A. m. ligustica there are two races, the darker leather brown northern Italian bee from the Ligurian Alps region which was discovered to be resistant to acarine in the 1900s, while the other Italian bee race, from regions near Bologna and further south, was highly susceptible to acarine and within this race there are two color strains, the traditional Italian yellow and a rarer all-golden color.

Description The races of the honey bee are classified into various named instances of an informal taxonomic rank of race—below that of subspecies—on the basis of shared genetic traits. The term "honey bee" means a bee of the species Apis mellifera which descend from bees that originated in Africa. Differences in the colors of bees may be more pronounced in queens and drones; workers are much less easily differentiated by color. Drones are produced from the unfertilized eggs of queens and therefore their genetic characteristics depend entirely on those of the queen, whereas worker bees are produced from fertilized eggs. To make things even more complicated, a queen will normally mate multiple times, the spermatozoa from which are retained within her body, meaning that workers may only be half-sisters to each other, and their colors and other characteristics may differ. In the Americas, there has been a great deal of interbreeding of subspecies, since all honey bees were imported at some point after 1492 and the subsequent Columbian Exchange. Among beekeepers, the term race has been used increasingly imprecisely, and is often used to refer to bee subspecies and hybrids, as well as subspecies divisions, more improperly. There are also variations within subspecies (like within A. m. mellifera), being little more than color variants that may not be correlated with distinct distributions; these are sometimes referred to as native races. These are often given their own names when described, but zoological nomenclature does not recognize these named "races" as valid, as only ranks of subspecies and above have formal scientific names in zoology.

Classifications Based on morphological similarities and the separation of regions during and since the last Ice Age, there are five bee lineages:

A (African, subspecies from central and southern Africa) C ("carnica", subspecies from east and south of the Alps, including those along the northern Mediterranean) M ("mellifera", subspecies from western Europe), O (Oriental, subspecies from the eastern end of the range of the species) Y ("yemenitica", subspecies from Ethiopia) (Hybrids and bee breeds, even with known ancestry, such as the Buckfast bee, are not included within the bee lineages; they are crossings of the Apis mellifera subspecies and are not defined as subspecies in their own right) The known subspecies within the lineage 'A' are:

A. m. adansonii A. m. capensis A. m. intermissa (formerly known as A. m. major) A. m. jemenitica A. m. lamarckii A. m. litorea A. m. monticola A. m. ruttneri A. m. sahariensis A. m. scutellata A. m. unicolor The known subspecies within the lineage 'C' are:

A. m. carnica A. m. cecropia A. m. ligustica A. m. macedonica The known subspecies within the lineage 'M' are:

A. m. mellifera A. m. iberiensis (formerly known as A. m. iberica) A. m. sinisxinyuan The known subspecies within the lineage 'O' are:

A. m. adami A. m. anatoliaca A. m. armeniaca A. m. caucasica A. m. cypria A. m. meda A. m. syriaca The known subspecies within the lineage 'Y') are:

A. m. bandasii A. m. sudanensis A. m. yemenitica

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Honey bee race

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Honey bee race claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Honey bee race before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Honey bee race ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Honey bee race

In research: Honey bee race appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Honey bee race in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Honey bee race is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Beekeeping, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Honey bee race outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Honey bee race in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Honey bee race means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Honey bee race out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Honey bee race in simple terms?

Why does Honey bee race matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Honey bee race?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Honey bee race.