Giant honey bee
The giant honey bee is a big honey bee from South and Southeast Asia. It does not live in a hive. It builds one huge open honeycomb that hangs from a tree branch, a cliff or a building, covered by a thick blanket of bees.
How big is it?
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Fun facts
One comb can be up to a metre big.
Up to 100,000 bees can live in one colony.
Sometimes up to 200 colonies hang in the very same tree.
The colonies move with the seasons, and some come back to the same place every year.
For a very long time, people have climbed up to the nests to collect honey and wax. This is called honey hunting.
Most asked questions about Giant honey bee
?Where does the giant honey bee build its nest?
Out in the open, high up on tree branches, under cliffs and on buildings.
?How big is the giant honey bee?
It is about 1.7 to 2 centimetres long, bigger than the honey bees in Europe.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Apis dorsata
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Apidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Apidae
- Lives on
- Asia
- Also known as
- Rock bee
Where the facts come from
- Apis dorsata (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 Peterwchen. CC BY-SA 4.0, 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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