.218 Bee

Winchester introduced the .218 Bee in 1937 by necking the older .32-20 Winchester case down to take a .224-inch bullet, producing a small rimmed, bottlenecked round for single-shot and lever-action rifles built to handle a light, fast varmint cartridge rather than the pistol-length rounds those actions had traditionally fired. It arrived alongside Winchester’s Model 65 lever rifle and was later chambered in the company’s bolt-action Model 43, giving hunters a cartridge built specifically to shoot small game and varmints without the report or recoil of a full-size rifle round.

The Bee’s rimmed case suited the tubular-magazine and single-shot actions available when it was introduced, at the cost of the smoother, box-magazine feeding that a rimless case like the .222 Remington would later offer purpose-built bolt rifles. That competition, arriving in the 1950s, left the Bee as a niche cartridge rather than a mainstream one; it survives today mainly through handloaders and a small range of factory ammunition rather than as a widely stocked commercial round.

Case and pressure figures here are transcribed from the current C.I.P. datasheet and are verified. Hornady’s own product page for its 45-grain hollow-point load states both a muzzle velocity and the 24-inch test barrel it was measured from, which is what lets this entry carry a sourced velocity point — most of the loads that appear in reloading tables for this cartridge publish a velocity with no barrel length at all, and those are left out rather than recorded as something they are not. No further factory loads with a stated test barrel were found.