Welcome to BeeBase

BeeBase is an archive and will not be updated. The most up-to-date bee genome data is now available through the navigation bar on the HGD Home page.

Apis mellifera. @Alex Wild Photography

BeeBase is a comprehensive sequence data source for the bee research community. It currently hosts the genomes of Apis mellifera and three of its pathogens, as well as Bombus terrestris and B. impatiens; the genomes of two additional species, Apis dorsata and A. florea are currently under analysis and will soon be incorporated. BeeBase is built on assemblies Amel_4.5 of the A. mellifera genome, Bter_1.0 of the B. terrestris genome and Bimp_2.0 of the B. impatiens genome.

Honey bee is a model species for social behavior and an essential species to global ecology as pollinators. The 2006 report from the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium provided our first genome-wide insight into the life of social insects. An informatics resource like BeeBase opens the possibility for further exploration to find answers to how such life style came to be.

The Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium has completed a genome sequence improvement effort using Next Generation Sequencing technologies to increase continuity and coverage of the A. mellifera genome assembly and improve the gene set, producing assembly Amel_4.5 and Official Gene Set OGSv3.2. Details are provided in a report published in BMC Genomics.