Production notes

The development of Bee Movie began in 2003, when Steven Spielberg approached DreamWorks Animation CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg after Jerry Seinfeld asked him to make an animated film featuring insects. Seinfeld spent a week in Los Angeles working on it. Teleconferencing system HP Halo was installed in Seinfeld's office in New York, enabling him to work on the film and interact between coasts. Seinfeld said he set the film in New York because it was "the Tigris and Euphrates of comedy", and Katzenberg was the main reason for making the film. The budget was approximately $150 million. Spielberg appeared in two live-action trailers for this film in November 2006 and early 2007 where he interacted with Seinfeld, who wore a bee costume. Using these trailers as a basis, promotional live-action short skits surrounding the production of the movie, branded as Bee Movie TV Juniors, would air on NBC during their Fall primetime lineup.

Bee Movie earned $126.6 million in the United States and Canada and $166.9 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $293.5 million. DreamWorks Animation reported that the film made $27.3 million in home media revenues. The film was released with American Gangster and Martian Child on November 2, 2007. Bee Movie earned $10.2 million on its first day. The film debuted at second earning $39.1 million from 3,928 theaters. Its second weekend earnings dropped by 32% to $26 million, and followed by another $14.3 million the third weekend. Bee Movie completed its theatrical run in the United States and Canada on February 14, 2008.

Bee Movie has an approval rating of 49% based on 171 professional reviews on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 5.8/10. Its critical consensus reads, "Bee Movie has humorous moments, but its awkward premise and tame delivery render it mostly forgettable." Metacritic (which uses a weighted average) assigned Bee Movie a score of 54 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "It's on the easygoing level of Surf's Up, and a full tick up from, say, Over the Hedge or The Ant Bully. But given the Seinfeld pedigree it's something of a disappointment." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three out of four stars, saying "At its relaxed best, when it's about, well, nothing, the slyly comic Bee Movie is truly beguiling." Desson Thomson of The Washington Post said, "Bee Movie feels phoned in on every level. The images, usually computer animation's biggest draw, are disappointingly average. And as for the funny stuff, well, that's where you were supposed to come in." A. O. Scott of The New York Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying "The most genuinely apian aspect of Bee Movie is that it spends a lot of its running time buzzing happily around, sniffing out fresh jokes wherever they may bloom." Claudia Puig gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie is certainly not low-budget, but it has all the staying power and creative value of a B-movie. The secret life of bees, as told by Seinfeld, is a bore with a capital B." Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the film three stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie is not Shrek, and it is not Ratatouille either (by far the standout computer-animated feature of the year). But it has enough buzzing wit and eye-popping animation to win over the kids—and probably more than a few parents, too." Richard Roeper gave the film a positive review, saying "This is a beautifully animated, cleverly executed, warm and funny adventure." Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars, saying "All of this material, written by Seinfeld and writers associated with his television series, tries hard, but never really takes off. We learn at the outset of the movie that bees theoretically cannot fly. Unfortunately, in the movie, that applies only to the screenplay. It is really, really, really hard to care much about a platonic romantic relationship between Renee Zellweger and a bee, although if anyone could pull it off, she could." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe gave the film three out of four stars, saying "The vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian. If I believed in a sitcom afterlife, I'd swear the whole thing was cooked up by Kramer and George's dad."

Bee Movie led the 35th Annie Awards season with five nominations (including Best Animated Feature). At the 65th Golden Globe Awards, it was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film. The 13th Critics' Choice Awards nominated the film for Best Animated Feature.

Years after the film's release, Bee Movie has seen an unexpected rise in popularity as an absurd and surreal Internet meme. In 2015, posts of the film's dialog transcript (erroneously called the "script") spread across Facebook. On November 17, 2016, YouTube user Avoid at All Costs uploaded a video titled "The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster", where the entire film is sped up every time the word "bee" is spoken, condensing the film to only 7 minutes; the video amassed twelve million views. Vanity Fair later characterized the film's sudden popularity as "totally bizarre", and later identified Jason Richards as one of the meme's larger promoters through his @Seinfeld2000 Twitter account. Inverse felt the film's ironic internet popularity has helped the movie become critically reevaluated by millennial critics who now view the film as an unironic, genuinely well-made film. Seinfeld has commented on the film's reemergence as a meme as "kinda weird but pretty welcoming" and said "you just can't predict what the internet will do next, but you gotta love it", but expressed no interest in making a sequel to Bee Movie despite its online popularity.