A honey bee colony has two castes of females: sterile workers, which are smaller (10–15 mm), and fertile queens, which are larger (18–20 mm); the males, called drones, are 15–17 mm long. Despite their small size, workers have longer wings than drones; males have much larger eyes than females; and the females of both castes have a sting, which in the worker is barbed and detaches from her body when she stings.
A morphometric study of western honey bee wings published in 2024 indicates that drones had clearly larger forewings than workers, and that queens' wings were on average larger than workers' wings, with broad overlap. Wing shape differs between castes, and the earlier draft's statement that workers' wings are longer than drones' must not be generalised without another documented measurement.
In NAKTASHIF worlds:Gardens, farms and human-associated habitats
Approved version OWNER-REVIEW-20260927T182444490 · last approved 27 September 2026
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The Yemeni bee (Apis mellifera jemenitica) is the native local race in Saudi Arabia; it has been kept in the Arabian Peninsula since at least 2000 BC, is more heat-tolerant than races imported from Europe, and is the only one that survives in central Saudi Arabia. The Saudi bees of this race are smaller, more slender, shorter-haired and more yellowish, and make up about 70% of the bees kept in the Kingdom.
The Carniolan bee (Apis mellifera carnica) is an imported race kept in Saudi Arabia alongside the native bee and its Egyptian–Carniolan hybrids; its workers are larger than native Saudi workers in measurements such as forewing length and proboscis length.
The honey bee has a body divided into head, thorax and abdomen, six legs and two pairs of transparent wings, as well as antennae and compound eyes. Female workers carry specialized structures for collecting pollen on their hind legs, and queens, drones and workers differ in body, structure and behaviour.
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