About Honey Bee Awareness
HoneyBeeAwareness.org is an independent education, research, public-safety, and incident-documentation project focused on serious bee incidents, responsible stewardship, and the preservation of gentle, productive, manageable honey bees.
Mission Statement
HoneyBeeAwareness.org exists to help people recognize real bee-related risk, document serious incidents accurately, improve public safety, support responsible beekeeping, and encourage credible research aimed at reducing extreme inherited defensive behavior while preserving healthy, productive, manageable honey bees.
Our goal is to provide practical information for homeowners, beekeepers, outdoor workers, first responders, schools, researchers, public officials, livestock owners, pet owners, and community members who may encounter honey bees in real-world situations.
This site is not meant to create fear of honey bees. Honey bees are valuable pollinators and important agricultural livestock. The purpose is to help people understand the difference between normal, manageable honey bee behavior and highly defensive situations that may create serious public-safety risk.
Core Message
Save the Right Bees.
Do Not Normalize Extreme Defensive Bee Behavior.
Responsible beekeeping protects people and preserves better bees. Highly defensive behavior near homes, workers, animals, schools, public spaces, or responders should not be ignored, excused, or treated as normal.
Why This Site Exists
HoneyBeeAwareness.org grew out of a serious bee attack that affected our family and exposed a larger public-safety problem: many people do not know how quickly a bee incident can escalate, how to recognize risky situations, or what to do when bees begin attacking.
The loss of our three dogs became the painful starting point for a broader effort to help other families, workers, responders, animals, and communities avoid being caught unprepared.
That experience raised a practical question: what can be documented, taught, researched, and shared so fewer people and animals are harmed in preventable bee-related incidents?
A fuller personal account is available separately for visitors who want to understand the origin of this project without making this main About page too long. Visitors can also watch Tammy share the April 9 attack and its lasting impact in her own words.
Watch Part 1: Our Story Watch Tammy’s Story
Guiding Principles
Honey Bee Awareness is being built around four connected principles:
Education
Explain bee behavior, common misunderstandings, and practical safety steps in plain language people can use before and during real incidents.
Research
Encourage credible research into inherited defensive behavior, genetics, selective breeding, genomics and DNA-based research tools, management practices, incident patterns, and unanswered public-safety questions.
Public Safety
Reduce preventable risk to people, pets, livestock, outdoor workers, first responders, schools, and public spaces.
Stewardship
Encourage preservation of healthy, gentle, manageable honey bees while taking repeated or extreme defensive behavior seriously.
What We Are Building
HoneyBeeAwareness.org is being developed in stages. Current and planned resources include:
- A searchable incident list built from public sources, field reports, and submitted leads.
- Incident statistics that help identify patterns by state, trigger, severity, bee identification status, animal impact, medical treatment, and responder involvement.
- A public incident submission form for serious reports that may deserve review.
- Safety guidance for homeowners, outdoor workers, responders, pet owners, livestock owners, schools, and organizations.
- Research references related to honey bee behavior, genetics, selective breeding, genomics, management, and public-safety awareness.
- Official-record and public-health context showing the larger scale that individual incident reports alone cannot capture.
- Case studies and misconception pages that explain how risky situations develop and why people are often surprised by them.
What We Are Not
Honey Bee Awareness is not anti-bee, anti-beekeeper, or anti-agriculture. This project does not claim that every defensive colony is Africanized, and it does not encourage panic or unnecessary destruction of honey bees.
The message is more careful than that: good honey bees are worth protecting, managed bees should be responsibly managed, and highly defensive bee behavior near people, animals, workers, or public spaces should be taken seriously.
How Incident Information Should Be Read
The incident database is a working public-safety research tool. It is not a complete official record of every serious bee incident. Early records may include public news reports, official sources, field reports, family reports, submitted leads, and items that still need review.
Not every report has the same level of verification. HoneyBeeAwareness.org separates source strength, bee identification status, severity, and notes whenever possible so readers can tell the difference between confirmed facts, reported claims, and leads that need more information.
How We Build the Incident Database
HBA uses source-strength labels, bee-identification status, severity categories, date notes, and review notes so visitors can understand how records are sourced and classified.
Our Vision
Our vision is a future where gentle, productive, manageable honey bees remain central to agriculture, communities are better protected from serious bee-related hazards, and credible research helps reduce extreme inherited defensive behavior through responsible breeding, management, genomics, and other scientifically validated approaches.
Using This Site
Visitors can start with the Incident List, review patterns on the Incident Statistics page, read practical safety guidance, or share a serious bee-related incident through the Submit Incident page.