In the first part of this paper, we propose honey bee models for four non-autonomous pathways implicated in inducible host defence, Toll, Imd, Janus kinase (JAK)/STAT and JNK (Boutros et al ., 2002) , based primarily on extensive searches for orthologues to well-studied fruit fly, mosquito and moth species. While these pathways engage in cross-talk and can direct some of the same immune effectors, they have well-defined structures and interaction sets, and are best tackled as individual entities. Most honey bee components for these pathways remain to be validated by functional tests, yet we feel that the presented models serve two important purposes. First, they point toward the most likely orthologues involved with all stages of the immune response, thus setting the stage for postgenomic functional work on honey bee immunity. Second, the models themselves show intriguing differences between species for these canonical immune pathways with respect to gene losses and duplications.