Western honey bee Since workers are not fully sexually developed, they do not mate with drones and thus can only produce haploid (male) offspring. Queens and workers have a modified ovipositor, a stinger, with which they defend the hive. Unlike bees of any other genus and the queens of their own species, the stinger of worker honey bees is barbed. Contrary to popular belief, a bee does not always die soon after stinging; this misconception is based on the fact that a bee will usually die after stinging a human or other mammal. The stinger and its venom sac, with musculature and a
Honey bee refer to "Apis" as either honey bee or honeybee, entomologist Robert Snodgrass asserts that correct usage requires two words, i.e. honey bee, as it is a kind or type of bee, whereas it is incorrect to run the two words together as in dragonfly or butterfly, because the latter are not flies. Honey bee, not honeybee, is the listed common name in the Integrated Taxonomic Information System, the Entomological Society of America Common Names of Insects Database, and the Tree of Life Web Project. Nonetheless, compounds gradually solidify in the orthography of natural languages in ways that do not always