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Bee Butts
Some of the color variations in honeybees
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Images Copyright 2001, David L. Green
Use without permission is theft. For Permission:
This is only a small number of photos to show the nearly infinite variations in color patterns that are seen in America's honeybees. More photos will be added as I have opportunity to photograph more variations. Like most Americans, the honeybees are mongrels. The English black bee was first brought in colonial times, but did not do well, so the German black bee was imported. It was the main strain of bees until the 20th century. It was highly productive, but often nasty in disposition. When the Italian bee became available, beekeepers switched en masse, as this was a new experience for them to have a gentle bee (one that has been kept for thousands of years). Italian genes now predominate, and give most of America's kept bees a light leather to golden color. Caucasians (tend to be gray) and Carniolans (dark color) are also used by a minority of beekeepers.
The Italian bee is also highly productive in the US. Africanized bees are now entering the USA in the Southwest, though the colors are not usually a distinguishable from Italian. It is customary to badmouth the Africanized bee as a "killer bee." However, each race of bee has its good and bad points, and there are large variations even within relatively pure races. In the "melting pot" of America, perhaps the strongest possible bee will emerge, with gentleness, productivity, disease and parasite resistance and other positive characterisitics.
