Honeybee Anatomy: Labeled Diagrams and Interactive 3D Bee

A honeybee has three body parts: a head with two compound eyes, three ocelli, two elbowed antennae, mandibles and a long proboscis; a thorax with two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs; and an abdomen that holds the honey stomach, gut, heart, wax glands and, in females, the sting. A very short, narrow waist (the petiole) joins the thorax to the abdomen.

This page describes the worker of the western honeybee, Apis mellifera, the bee kept in hives around the world, and flags where the queen and drone differ. Workers are sterile females and the smallest caste; the queen has the same-sized head and thorax but a longer, plumper abdomen; drones have larger heads and thoraxes and a bullet-shaped abdomen (UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-568). The classic reference for everything here is R. E. Snodgrass's The Anatomy of the Honey Bee (1910), still cited in modern studies.

The external anatomy of a worker honeybee includes the compound eyes, ocelli, antennae and mouthparts on the head; the scutum, scutellum, tegulae and propodeum on the thorax; two pairs of wings; six legs; and the striped abdomen with tergites above, sternites below, wax mirrors, spiracles and the sting.

In bees, ants and wasps the "thorax" includes the first abdominal segment, the propodeum. So the narrow waist is abdominal segment 2 (UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-568), and a worker's visible abdomen shows only six segments (Snodgrass, 1910). The dense, branched hairs that cover the bee trap pollen and insulate the flight muscles.

• Scutum: Forms the roof of the flight box. The flight muscles flex it slightly to drive the wings.
• Scutellum: Part of the flexible roof of the thorax that moves the wings.
• Propodeum: Carries a large spiracle and forms the joint with the waist.
• Petiole: Lets the abdomen bend, for example to aim the sting. The oesophagus, aorta and nerve cord all pass through it.
• Sternites: Protect the belly. In workers, sternites 4–7 carry the wax mirrors.
• Wax mirrors: The wax glands secrete liquid wax through these plates; it hardens into thin scales in the pockets below.

A honeybee has five eyes: two large compound eyes on the sides of the head and three small ocelli in a triangle on top (Snodgrass, 1910). Each compound eye is made of thousands of facets (ommatidia), each with its own lens and 8 or 9 photoreceptors (Kelber & Somanathan, 2019). Bees see ultraviolet, blue and green light. Drone eyes are so large that they meet on top of the head, pushing the ocelli forward onto the face.

The antennae are elbowed, with a long scape and a flagellum (including the small pedicel). Workers and queens have 12 antennal segments; drones have 13 (Snodgrass, 1910). The antennae carry the bee's sense of smell, taste and touch.

Honeybee mouthparts combine biting and lapping. The mandibles mould wax and handle propolis. The proboscis is a temporary tube formed by the hairy glossa (tongue) in the middle, two blade-like galeae from the maxillae, and two labial palps; nectar rises up it by capillary action and the sucking pump of the pharynx. The proboscis is much longer in workers than in queens or drones (Snodgrass, 1910).

• Compound eyes: See colour, shapes and movement. Each facet (ommatidium) has its own lens and 8 or 9 photoreceptors and acts like one pixel (Kelber & Somanathan, 2019).
• Ocelli: Measure light level and help keep the bee level in flight.
• Antennal flagellum: Smells flowers, pheromones and the hive, tastes, and senses touch, humidity and sound (air vibrations).
• Mandibles: Mould wax and propolis, carry debris, feed larvae and fight. Bees do not chew solid food.
• Glossa: Laps up nectar, honey and water, which rise between the proboscis parts by capillary action and suction.
• Galeae: With the labial palps they form a temporary tube around the glossa through which liquid is drawn up.
• Labial palps: Help close the feeding tube and taste food.

A honeybee has two pairs of clear, veined wings. In flight each hindwing is locked to the forewing by a row of tiny hooks, the hamuli, which catch a rolled fold on the trailing edge of the forewing; a worker has 20–22 hooks on each hindwing (Eraghi et al., 2021). The wings are driven indirectly. Large dorsal longitudinal musclesarch the roof of the thorax and push the wings down; upright dorsoventral muscles pull the roof down and flip the wings up. Neither muscle attaches to the wings themselves.

• Hamuli: Hook into a rolled fold on the trailing edge of the forewing, coupling the wings in flight.
• Dorsal longitudinal muscles: Contract to arch the thorax roof, which pushes the wings down. They are 'indirect' because they move the thorax, not the wings.
• Dorsoventral muscles: Contract to pull the roof down, which flips the wings up. They alternate with the longitudinal muscles to beat the wings.
• Tegulae: Protect the delicate wing hinge.

Every leg has a coxa, trochanter, femur, tibia and five-part tarsus with claws and a sticky pad. Each pair also has a special job. The front legs carry the antenna cleaner, a notch with a comb on the basitarsus closed by a flat spur on the tibia. The middle legs carry a long tibial spur. The hind legs of workers carry the corbicula (pollen basket), the pollen comb and the pollen press.

• Antenna cleaner: The bee pulls an antenna through the notch to comb it clean (Snodgrass, 1910).
• Corbicula: Holds a pellet of moistened pollen, or propolis, for the flight home (Snodgrass, 1910).
• Pollen comb: Brushes pollen off the body hairs; the opposite leg's pollen press then pushes it into the basket (Snodgrass, 1910).
• Pollen press: Scrapes pollen from the opposite leg's pollen comb and presses it up into the pollen basket as the joint opens and closes.
• Middle tibial spur: Used to clean the wings and to pry pollen pellets out of the pollen baskets in the hive.

Inside a honeybee are the digestive tract (pharynx, oesophagus, honey stomach, proventriculus, ventriculus, Malpighian tubules, small intestine and rectum), a tubular heart and aorta, a breathing system of spiracles, tracheae and air sacs, a brain and ventral nerve cord, the flight muscles, many glands, the reproductive organs and the sting apparatus.

Honey stomach and digestion

Nectar passes up the proboscis, through the pharynx and the long oesophagus, and into the honey stomach (the crop), a stretchy bag at the front of the abdomen. Foragers carry nectar home in it and regurgitate it to house bees. The four-lipped proventriculus keeps the load in, but strains out pollen grains and passes them into the ventriculus, where food is digested. About one hundred Malpighian tubules remove waste, and the rectum stores faeces (Snodgrass, 1910).

• Honey stomach: Carries nectar and water home. Foragers regurgitate the load to house bees; nectar is not digested here.
• Proventriculus: Keeps the nectar load in the honey stomach, but strains pollen grains out of it and passes them on to be digested.
• Ventriculus: Digests pollen and sugars and absorbs nutrients (Snodgrass, 1910).
• Malpighian tubules: Excretory organs (insect kidneys) that remove nitrogen wastes from the hemolymph (Snodgrass, 1910).
• Rectum: Stores faeces through the winter so bees can wait for a 'cleansing flight' instead of soiling the hive.

Heart, aorta and air sacs

The heart is a muscular tube under the top of the abdomen. Snodgrass described four chambers in abdominal segments 3 to 6, continued forward as the aorta, which forms a convoluted loop of about 18 folds where it passes through the waist and then runs through the thorax to the head. Bees breathe through ten pairs of spiracles (two on the thorax, eight on the abdomen) that open into tracheae and large, balloon-like air sacs, which the abdomen pumps like bellows.

Honeybee brain

The honeybee brain sits between the eyes, above the oesophagus. Its large optic lobes process vision, the antennal lobes process smell, and two pairs of cup-shaped mushroom bodies on top handle learning and memory. A subesophageal ganglion below controls the mouthparts. The mushroom bodies grow as a worker ages and starts foraging (Kraft et al., 2025).

• Brain: Processes vision, smell and touch and controls complex behaviour such as navigation and the waggle dance.
• Mushroom bodies: Centres for learning, memory and combining senses.
• Optic lobes: Process images and colour from the compound eyes.
• Air sacs: Act as bellows: the abdomen pumps air through them, ventilating the flight muscles.
• Aorta: Carries hemolymph forward through the thorax and empties it into the head, where it bathes the brain before flowing back.

Worker honeybees are packed with glands. In the head, the hypopharyngeal glands of young nurse bees make brood food and royal jelly, and the mandibular glands add fatty acids; in the queen, the mandibular glands make queen mandibular pheromone. Under the abdomen, four pairs of wax glands secrete beeswax. Near the tip, the Nasonov gland releases an orientation scent, found only in workers (Gryboś et al., 2025).

• Hypopharyngeal glands: In young nurse bees they make the protein-rich part of royal jelly and brood food.
• Mandibular glands: In workers they add fatty acids to royal jelly and make an alarm scent. In the queen they make queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), which holds the colony together.
• Wax glands: Secrete beeswax. Wax-making workers hang in chains, and the wax scales are passed forward to the mandibles to build comb (Snodgrass, 1910).
• Nasonov gland: Releases a lemon-like scent (geraniol, citral and related terpenoids) that guides bees to the hive entrance, a swarm cluster or water.

The honeybee sting is a modified egg-laying tube, so only females (workers and the queen) have one. It is made of a single stylet and two barbed lancets that slide alternately to drive the sting into skin, plus plates and muscles that power them, the venom gland and venom sac, Dufour's gland and Koschevnikov's gland (Ramirez-Esquivel & Ravi, 2023).

• Stylet: Forms the top of the venom canal and guides the two lancets on rails.
• Lancets: They move alternately, digging deeper with each stroke; rear-facing barbs anchor them in skin.
• Sting plates & muscles: Lever the lancets in and out. They tear away with the sting together with the terminal ganglion, which keeps the sting working on its own (Ramirez-Esquivel & Ravi, 2023).
• Venom gland: Produces venom, which collects in the venom sac (Ramirez-Esquivel & Ravi, 2023).
• Venom sac: Feeds venom into the sting bulb. It tears away with the sting and keeps emptying into the wound.
• Koschevnikov's gland: Makes the sting alarm pheromone. Its main component, isoamyl acetate, smells of bananas and makes other bees attack (Gryboś et al., 2025).

A colony normally has a single queen, many thousands of workers and, in season, drones. Workers and queens develop from fertilised eggs and are both female; the difference comes from larval diet: larvae fed copious royal jelly become queens. Drones develop from unfertilised eggs (UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-568). Use the caste switch above the 3D model to compare them.

Development times are from UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-568 and EENY-429; gland and antennal details from Snodgrass (1910); the ovariole counts from Jackson et al. (2011) and Ronai et al. (2017). A virgin queen mates with about 15 drones in her first two weeks and stores their sperm in her spermatheca for life (UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-568). During mating in flight, the drone's endophallus is everted into the queen and the drone dies (Snodgrass, 1910).

• Ovaries: Produce eggs. A queen can lay up to 1,500 eggs a day (UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-568).
• Spermatheca: Stores sperm from the 15 or so drones she mates with in her first two weeks of life, for the rest of her life (UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-568).
• Testes: Produce sperm during development; in adults sperm is stored in the seminal vesicles.
• Endophallus: Turns inside out into the queen's sting chamber during mating in flight; the drone dies as it breaks away (Snodgrass, 1910).

Honeybees and dragonflies share the basic insect plan, but their internal anatomy reflects very different lives: the bee is a social nectar and pollen feeder, the dragonfly a solitary aerial predator. The table summarises the main differences students are asked to compare.

The honeybee column follows the sources on this page. The dragonfly column is a general comparison from standard insect anatomy rather than a single cited study.

The worker's stinger is only about 2.5 mm long but it is a complete machine. Its shaft is a single stylet above two lancets. The lancets slide along rails on the stylet and move alternately, so the sting walks into the skin a little further with each stroke. Rear-facing barbs, on average about 10 per lancet, catch in the tissue as each lancet is pulled back and anchor it while the other advances. Venom flows down a canal between the stylet and lancets. (Ramirez-Esquivel & Ravi (2023): functional anatomy of the worker honeybee stinger, iScience.)

When a worker stings a vertebrate with thick, elastic skin, the barbs can hold so firmly that the whole apparatus tears away from the bee: the piercing parts, the plates and muscles that drive them, the venom gland and venom sac, Koschevnikov's gland that releases the alarm pheromone, and the terminal abdominal ganglion that keeps the sting pumping on its own. This is stinger autotomy. It can kill the worker, but it keeps delivering venom after the bee has been brushed off. (Ramirez-Esquivel & Ravi (2023): functional anatomy of the worker honeybee stinger, iScience.)

The queen's sting is longer and curved, carries fewer and smaller barbs and is more solidly attached to her body (Snodgrass, 1910), so she can sting repeatedly without losing it. Queens use it mainly against rival queens. Drones have no sting at all, because the sting is a modified egg-laying organ (ovipositor) and only females have one. (Snodgrass (1910): The Anatomy of the Honey Bee, USDA Bureau of Entomology.)

A foraging worker collects pollen with her whole body. The branched hairs pick up grains as she moves over flowers. She then brushes them off with the stiff spines on the inner face of the hind basitarsus (the pollen comb), moistens them with nectar, and transfers them to the outer face of the opposite hind tibia. There, a smooth, slightly hollow area fringed with long curved hairs, the corbicula or pollen basket, holds a growing pellet (Snodgrass, 1910). The pollen press at the tibia–basitarsus joint pushes each new load up into the basket. (Snodgrass (1910): The Anatomy of the Honey Bee, USDA Bureau of Entomology.)

Only workers have this equipment. Bomtorin and colleagues showed that the hind tibia of the worker develops as an expanded, bristle-free corbicula, while in queens the structure is absent; the difference is set during larval development by caste-biased gene expression, including the Hox gene Ultrabithorax, in response to the different larval diets. Bumblebees, stingless bees and orchid bees carry pollen the same way, which is why this group is called the corbiculate bees. (Bomtorin et al. (2012): Hox genes and caste differences in honeybee hind legs, PLoS ONE.)

In the front of the abdomen the oesophagus expands into a thin-walled sac, the crop, which in bees is called the honey stomach. Behind it is a short, rigid neck, the proventriculus, and then the large U-shaped ventriculus with thick, spongy, ringed walls, where digestion actually happens. A ring of about one hundred long, coiled Malpighian tubules opens at the start of the short small intestine; they are excretory organs, not part of digestion. The large intestine (rectum) follows (Snodgrass, 1910). (Snodgrass (1910): The Anatomy of the Honey Bee, USDA Bureau of Entomology.)

The proventriculus pushes into the rear of the honey stomach and has four triangular lips, each with a special band of muscle. These lips can close the honey stomach so a forager keeps her nectar load separate from her own food, and they can strain pollen grains out of the nectar and pass them back to be digested. That is why diagrams often call the proventriculus the 'honey stopper'. The nectar itself is regurgitated to house bees in the hive and turned into honey there. (Snodgrass (1910): The Anatomy of the Honey Bee, USDA Bureau of Entomology.)

A honeybee colony is held together by glands. In young nurse workers the hypopharyngeal glands, long chains of small lobes coiled in the front of the head, make the protein-rich part of brood food and royal jelly. Snodgrass noted that they are entirely absent in drones and at best rudimentary in queens, which shows how closely they are tied to the worker's job. The mandibular glands add fatty acids. A larva fed copious royal jelly develops into a queen with about 100–180 ovarioles in each ovary (Jackson et al., 2011); a worker-fed larva becomes a worker with usually fewer than ten (Ronai et al., 2017). (Jackson, Tarpy & Fahrbach (2011): ovariole number in honey bee queens, J. Insect Science 11:82.)

The queen's own mandibular glands, paired sacs above the base of the mandibles, make queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), the best-studied honeybee pheromone and one that affects the whole colony. Workers have their own signals: the Nasonov gland, found only in workers, between the last two visible tergites, releases a terpene scent (geraniol, citral and related compounds) used to guide nestmates to the hive entrance, a swarm cluster or water; Koschevnikov's gland on the sting apparatus releases the sting alarm pheromone, whose main component isoamyl acetate smells of bananas. (Gryboś et al. (2025): the pheromone landscape of Apis mellifera, Molecules.)

A honeybee has five eyes: two compound eyes and three ocelli. Each compound eye is an apposition eye made of thousands of ommatidia. Each ommatidium has its own facet lens and eight or nine photoreceptors and acts like one pixel in the image, so a larger eye can have more pixels, larger facets, or both. Drones have the most extreme eyes, with enlarged regions of high resolution used to spot a queen against the sky. (Kelber & Somanathan (2019): spatial vision in Apidae, Insects.)

Durand and colleagues mapped the light-sensitive proteins (opsins) in all three castes. Bees see with UV-, blue- and green-sensitive photoreceptors. Workers and queens have three kinds of ommatidia in their compound eyes; in drones the upper two-thirds of the eye contains only two kinds, dominated by blue receptors, which suits a male looking upward for a flying queen. The ocelli contain UV- and green-sensitive receptors. (Durand et al. (2025): opsin distribution in the three honeybee castes, iScience.)

Vision feeds a brain that keeps changing. The mushroom bodies, the brain's learning centres, grow in their input regions as a worker ages and starts to forage. Kraft and colleagues found that long-lived winter bees keep this plasticity: their mushroom-body calyces expand again when spring foraging begins. (Kraft, Rössler & Groh (2025): mushroom body plasticity in winter bees, Developmental Neurobiology.)

1. How many eyes does a honeybee have? Answer: five, two compound eyes and three ocelli.
2. Which three parts form the proboscis? Answer: the glossa, the galeae and the labial palps.
3. What holds the forewing and hindwing together? Answer: the hamuli, 20–22 hooks on the hindwing.
4. Where is the pollen basket? Answer: on the outside of each hind tibia of a worker.
5. What is the difference between the honey stomach and the ventriculus? Answer: the honey stomach carries nectar; the ventriculus digests food.
6. Which gland makes royal jelly? Answer: the hypopharyngeal glands of young workers, with the mandibular glands.
7. Why does a worker usually die after stinging a mammal? Answer: the barbed lancets anchor the sting, which tears out with the venom sac, muscles and ganglion.
8. How can you recognise a drone? Answer: huge eyes meeting on top of the head, 13-segment antennae, blunt abdomen, no sting.

Compare with ant anatomy: ants and bees share the narrow waist, the antenna cleaner and hooked wings, and both store food in a crop.

The labeled list below matches the model (worker, queen and drone combined).