The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is essential to global ecology as a pollinator. It is native to Europe, western Asia, and Africa. Honey bee colonies having distinct social organization, with queens that produce offspring (by haplodiploidy, a sex determination system) and non-reproductive workers which gather and process food. One of the most evolved social behaviors that they show is their communication of new food discoveries with 'dance language', the only known non-primate symbolic language. This makes the honey bee a model organism for studying social behaviour. The genus Apis means "bee" in Latin, and mellifera comes from the Greek melli- "honey" and ferei "to bear".

The Apis mellifera complete genome sequence was published in 2006, by the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium. It contains 236 Mb, and approximately 10,600 protein-coding genes. The honey bee genome is characterized by a high A+T content, the absence of transposons, and a slow rate of evolution.