Spring beans are just object instances that are managed by the Spring IOC container. Spring IOC container carry the Bag of Bean.Bean creation,maintain and deletion are the responsibilities of Spring Container. We can put the bean in to Spring by Wiring and Auto Wiring. Wiring mean we manually configure it into the XML file. Auto Wiring mean we put the annotations in the Java file then Spring automatically scan the root-context where java configuration file, make it and put into the bag of Spring.

For a Java class to be usable as a Java bean, its setter- and getter-method names need to be as per the JavaBean guidelines (also called design patterns) for properties. If such a Java class is instantiable & manageable by the Spring IoC container, it is a Spring bean. To achieve this, the programmer wires the class as a bean definition of a suitable scope by using XML config files or annotations or a mix of both. The programmer can create new Spring beans out of existing Spring beans by wiring further by passing the latter to constructor-arguments of the former either as string-names as <idref> elements or by dependency injection (it can be recursive).

这个答案可以与我的这个SO答案一起阅读，以获得更多的背景信息。

春天有IoC容器，里面装着一袋豆子;创建、维护和删除是Spring Container的职责。 我们可以通过布线和自动布线将bean放到Spring中。 “连线”意味着我们手动将其配置到XML文件中，“自动连线”意味着我们将注释放入Java文件中，然后Spring自动扫描Java配置文件所在的根上下文，将其制作并放入Spring的包中。

这里是详细的URI，您可以从中获得有关bean的更多信息

Spring核心技术参考文档描述了bean是什么。

根据Spring IoC容器和bean的介绍部分(其中“IoC”表示“控制反转”):

在Spring中，构成应用程序主干并由Spring IoC容器管理的对象称为bean。bean是由Spring IoC容器实例化、组装和管理的对象。否则，bean只是应用程序中的众多对象之一。bean以及它们之间的依赖关系反映在容器使用的配置元数据中。

Bean和作用域在Bean作用域部分中描述:

When you create a bean definition, you create a recipe for creating actual instances of the class defined by that bean definition. The idea that a bean definition is a recipe is important, because it means that, as with a class, you can create many object instances from a single recipe. You can control not only the various dependencies and configuration values that are to be plugged into an object that is created from a particular bean definition but also control the scope of the objects created from a particular bean definition. This approach is powerful and flexible, because you can choose the scope of the objects you create through configuration instead of having to bake in the scope of an object at the Java class level. Beans can be defined to be deployed in one of a number of scopes.

bean是Spring Container管理的类的实例。

Bean是一个POJO(普通旧Java对象)，由spring容器管理。

默认情况下，Spring容器只创建bean的一个实例。
此bean被缓存在内存中，因此对该bean的所有请求将返回对同一bean的共享引用。

@Bean注释返回一个对象，spring在应用程序上下文中将该对象注册为bean。
方法内部的逻辑负责创建实例。

什么时候使用@Bean注释?

当没有自动配置选项时。 例如，当我们想从第三方库连接组件时，因为源代码不可用，所以我们不能用@Component注释类。

实时场景可能是某人想要连接到Amazon S3桶。 因为源不可用，所以他必须创建一个@bean。

@Bean
public AmazonS3 awsS3Client() {
    BasicAWSCredentials awsCreds = new BasicAWSCredentials(awsKeyId, accessKey);
    return AmazonS3ClientBuilder.standard().withRegion(Regions.fromName(region))
            .withCredentials(new AWSStaticCredentialsProvider(awsCreds)).build();
}

源代码以上的代码-> https://www.devglan.com/spring-mvc/aws-s3-java

因为我上面提到了@Component Annotation。

@Component表示带注释的类是一个“组件”。在使用基于注释的配置和类路径扫描时，这些类被认为是自动检测的候选类。

组件注释将类注册为单个bean。