Experiencing BeeSpace: Bee Biology Talk by Dr. Susan Fahrbach, p. 1 of 17
SECTION: INTRODUCING HONEY BEE TAXONOMY
So the first thing to think about when one is going to focus on a particular species is,
what type of organism is it. So I just wanted to remind you what type of animal is a
honey bee. And that's really just a way, because we understand how evolution connects
all living things together, of asking, “Who are its particularly close relatives?” And so
what I've given you are the typical hierarchical classifications, starting with domain and
then coming down to the species we study. And just to remind you that every species has
a Latin binomial that designates a specific species. There can be sub-species, or even
stocks or family groups within that, but they're all one particular species. As is typically
the case, there are multiple common names that designate a particular species. But here
we typically just say “honey bee” when we mean honey bee, we don't usually say their
names.
The other point I want to make is, though Mr. Stone has told you that the entire order
classifications are products of the human imagination or human intellectual activity – that
they don't exist in a real way that a species exists at a particular point in time – they are
very useful for helping us understand who is more closely related to whom. And that's
important in biology, because we can study one thing, and then by studying that one thing
as a model, we can learn lots about other similar things. So in the most simple way, we
can learn more about other members of the genus – that is, other honey bee species – by
studying the European honey bee. We can then learn about other insects that are so
closely related that humans have designated them as a family, and so on and so forth. So
we can learn things about all animals or all eukaryotes through the study of the honey
bee.
One of the really interesting features of the BeeSpace project is that it seeks to use the
honey bee as a model animal to address th