Apes e floribus melliferis mellificant.

Apes is nominative plural, so it is the subject: bees.

You can tell this because:

• mellificant is a plural verb: they make honey / they produce honey
• the sentence needs a plural subject
• apes is the nominative plural form of apis (bee)

So Apes ... mellificant = Bees ... make honey.

Because e means from / out of, and it takes the ablative case.

So:

• flos = flower
• floribus = from flowers after e

This is a very common Latin pattern:

• e/ex + ablative = from, out of

So e floribus means from flowers.

By itself, floribus could be either dative plural or ablative plural. The form is the same.

But here it must be ablative, because it follows the preposition e, and e requires the ablative.

So in this sentence:

• not to/for the flowers
• but from the flowers

Melliferis means honey-bearing or honey-producing.

It comes from:

• mel, mellis = honey
• -fer = bearing / carrying / producing

So floribus melliferis means honey-bearing flowers.

Because melliferis is an adjective describing floribus, and Latin adjectives must agree with the nouns they describe.

That means they match in:

• case
• number
• gender

Here:

• floribus = ablative plural
• melliferis = ablative plural
• both are masculine here, because flos is masculine

So floribus melliferis is a matched noun-adjective pair: from honey-bearing flowers.

Mellificant is:

• present tense
• active voice
• indicative mood
• third person plural

In other words, it means they make honey or they produce honey.

Its dictionary form is mellifico, mellificare.

Because the idea of honey is already built into the verb mellificant.

The verb comes from the root mel / mell- meaning honey, so mellificant already means something like:

• they make honey
• they produce honey

So Latin does not need an extra object here.

Latin word order is much freer than English word order because the endings show how the words function.

So this sentence can be arranged this way:

• Apes = subject first
• e floribus melliferis = prepositional phrase in the middle
• mellificant = verb at the end

Putting the verb at the end is very common in Latin.

The same basic meaning would still be understood in other orders, such as:

• Apes mellificant e floribus melliferis
• E floribus melliferis apes mellificant

But the given order is perfectly natural Latin.

Both e and ex mean the same thing: from, out of.

In practice:

• e is often used before consonants
• ex is often used before vowels or h

Since floribus begins with a consonant, e floribus is very natural.

You may still sometimes see ex before consonants in Latin, but e floribus is completely normal.

They are:

• apes → apis, apis = bee
• e → preposition meaning from, out of
• floribus → flos, floris = flower
• melliferis → mellifer, mellifera, melliferum = honey-bearing
• mellificant → mellifico, mellificare = make honey, produce honey

Knowing the dictionary forms helps you recognize how each word has been inflected in the sentence.

It describes the flowers, not the bees.

The clue is the grammar:

• melliferis matches floribus
• both are in the same case and number
• they stand together as a noun-adjective phrase

So the phrase means:

• from honey-bearing flowers

not:

• bees that are honey-bearing

No. Even though it is spelled the same way, it is a Latin word meaning bees, not the English plural of ape.

In restored classical pronunciation, apes would sound roughly like AH-pays.

So a learner should be careful not to read it like ordinary English apes.