[2] The Beeville, TX micropolitan statistical area includes all of Bee County.

On December 8, 1857, the Texas Legislature formed Bee County from sections of Refugio, Live Oak, San Patricio, Goliad, and Karnes Counties, naming it for Colonel Barnard Elliot Bee, who served the Republic of Texas as Sam Houston's secretary of war and Mirabeau B. Lamar's secretary of state.

[4] During the Anglo-American land speculation of the 1830s, the area's earliest settlers were mainly Irish immigrants, but by the late 1840s and early 1850s, the rise of Jacksonian expansionism inspired Southern whites from the North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi to occupy and build settlements in the area.

[5] As the constitution of the Republic of Texas no longer recognized the Catholic Church (or any church) as the state religion and slave-holding settlers came to dominate the area in the 1840s, small Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist congregations began forming with sustained missionary support from these denominations.

[7] The Aransas River forms in Bee County, southwest of Beeville and north of Skidmore.

As of the 2020 United States census, 31,047 people, 8,499 households, and 5,693 families resided in the county.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice operates the Correctional Institutions Division Region IV Office on the grounds of Chase Field Naval Air Station in unincorporated Bee County.

[18] In 1981 the county government provided firefighting services in unincorporated areas, and there was a proposal to move that competency to four rural firefighting districts made largely on school district boundaries, each with taxing powers.