The story of European and Africanized honeybees can be read as a small reflection of European colonialism played out in the insect world. When European settlers brought Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, to the Americas in the 1600s, they didn’t just import a pollinator — they imported an agricultural ideology. These bees were managed, bred, and treated as tools of production, mirroring the European expansionist model that sought to domesticate foreign lands and species alike.In forests and