April 26, 2025, 9:36 am | Read time: 6 minutes
Are bees merely part of a colony, or do they have individual personalities? A study reveals that honeybees significantly differ in their likelihood to attack. Even within a single colony, there are “gentle” and “aggressive” individuals who maintain their behavior over time. PETBOOK editor Saskia Schneider, a biologist and beekeeper with several honeybee colonies, explains what these intriguing findings mean for our understanding of social insect behavior.
Bees usually sting when they fear for their lives, such as when someone steps on them or accidentally crushes them while working with the colonies. But beekeepers know: There are always some honeybees that seem to actively seek stress. Without warning, they practically dart at you to sting. I used to think these were likely guard bees. At about 19 days old, honeybees start guarding the hive. Their venom sac is full, and they are tasked with keeping enemies away from the colony and attacking if necessary. However, a study has now found that not only age or external circumstances influence whether bees sting. The individual character is also crucial.
Do Bees Have a Character?
Honeybees live in large colonies of tens of thousands of animals. The colony is usually seen as a unit, even in terms of character. Some bee colonies are particularly diligent in collecting, while others are more prone to stinging. This is mainly due to genetics. However, during my studies working with honeybees, I noticed that there are individual differences in character among the bees, which are siblings or half-siblings.
There were bees that eagerly participated in all behavioral experiments, such as learning colors or scents. Others completely refused. This was noticeable because I marked the bees with numbered tags to distinguish them individually in the experiments. Since then, I’ve known that honeybees are not little robots that always function the same way. They are intelligent and social creatures with individual character. This has now been scientifically proven for the first time. The study was published in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B.”
Is Stinging Behavior an Individual Trait?
Behavioral researchers at the University of Konstanz examined whether honeybees (Apis mellifera) show individual and consistent differences in stinging behavior. The question was about the role played by substances like alarm pheromones, which bees release during an attack to alert other bees to the enemy. The presence of other bees could also influence defensive behavior.
It was long unclear whether stinging behavior in a situation is more controlled by environmental stimuli or if it is a stable, individual trait. Previous studies showed that defensive behavior at the colony level is inheritable and linked to certain gene regions.
This is also confirmed in practice: Beekeepers try not to create new colonies from those whose bees sting frequently. Some beekeepers even go so far as to kill the queen of the “stingers” and replace her with one from a gentler colony. However, the question of whether there are individual bees that are inherently more aggressive or gentle has not yet been answered by scientists.
Do Bees Sting More When They’re with Other “Stingers”?
The investigation consisted of two main parts. In the first series of experiments, researchers tested around 150 individual or paired honeybees in a so-called sting assay. The bees were exposed to a moving dummy in an artificial threat situation. The goal was to find out whether the bees stick to their decision to sting or if it depends on whether they smell the alarm pheromone or have a fellow bee with them.
In the second experiment, scientists deliberately grouped bees based on their previous stinging behavior, such as only “aggressive” or “gentle” bees, as well as mixed groups. They wanted to see if bees behave differently and sting more or less depending on the group composition.
It was important in the experiments that the bees could insert their stinger into the dummy but also retract it. Honeybees have barbs on their stinger. If they attack a mammal, the stinger gets stuck in the soft skin, and the bee practically tears it from its abdomen. Bees can only sting once and lose their lives afterward. However, if they attack insects like wasps, they can pull the stinger out of their hard shell.
“Gentle” Bees Stayed Gentle, “Aggressive” Stayed Aggressive
The study results clearly showed that honeybees make no distinction in whether the bees next to them also sting or if an alarm pheromone is in the air. They stick to their decision to sting — or not. There was an above-average number of bees that either always or never stung.
For individual bees, it was possible to predict with a 75 percent probability whether they would sting again in later tests — significantly more than the 50.64 percent expected with random behavior. Similarly, “gentle” bees continued to behave peacefully with 87.9 percent probability.
Surprisingly, bees in pairs stung less often than individual bees — a negative group effect. Additionally, the response to the alarm pheromone decreased over several test runs. Even with targeted changes in group composition, no changes in individual behavior were observed: “Gentle” bees remained gentle, and “aggressive” remained aggressive — regardless of whether they were surrounded by like-minded or opposite bees.
So Do Honeybees Have a Kind of “Personality”?
The results clearly demonstrate for the first time that honeybees have stable individual differences in defensive behavior. This suggests a kind of “personality” — at least in the context of stinging. This finding is significant because it shows that collective behavior in insect colonies is rooted at an individual level — a perspective that can deepen the understanding of social organization.
Moreover, the data show that social stimuli like the alarm pheromone only influence the threshold for a decision but do not trigger a fundamental change in behavior. This suggests that bees do not blindly follow social signals but evaluate them contextually.
However, the investigations were only conducted on bees of a certain age group, as only those identified as ready to defend by a feather stimulus at the hive were chosen. Whether similar behavioral patterns occur in other bee categories, such as nurse bees or young workers, remains open. The study authors explicitly note that their results provide the basis for such in-depth investigations.
Ants Are Resentful and Can Even Take Revenge
Are There Really Differences in Character Between Female and Male Dogs?
A study shows why cats develop unwanted scratching behavior and what can be done about it
Conclusion
Honeybees are not just part of a swarm — they have individual defense strategies. Bees maintain their decision to sting or not over multiple tests. Neither the alarm pheromone nor the group composition altered their personal tendency to sting. The authors suggest that social influences merely shift the threshold for the decision without overshadowing the individual “personality.”