A honeybee colony behaves less like a crowd of insects and more like one animal. No single bee is in charge, not even the queen. Each bee answers to what's around it: the smell of the brood, the temperature of the comb, the dances of returning foragers. Together those small decisions run the whole hive.
In high summer one of our colonies can hold around 50,000 bees. In winter it shrinks to perhaps 10,000 to 15,000, huddled together to keep warm.
The queen
There's one queen, and she's the mother of almost every bee in the hive. She is longer than the workers, with a tapering abdomen that reaches well past her wings. In late spring she can lay more than 1,500 eggs a day, one in each cell. Her smell (her pheromones) tells the colony that all is well.
A few days after she emerges, a young queen flies out to mate with a dozen or more drones in the air. She stores their sperm and never mates again. A good queen lives for two to three years, sometimes longer.
The workers
Workers are females that don't lay eggs, and they do everything else. What a worker does depends mostly on her age:
- First few days: cleaning and polishing cells ready for new eggs.
- About a week to two weeks old: feeding larvae as a nurse bee, making wax, building comb, taking nectar from foragers and turning it into honey.
- Around two to three weeks old: guarding the entrance and learning the landscape on short orientation flights.
- From about three weeks old to the end: foraging for nectar, pollen, water and propolis (a sticky resin from tree buds).
A summer worker lives about five or six weeks, and wears herself out flying. Bees born in late summer are different. These winter bees can live for five or six months, carrying the colony through to spring.
The drones
Drones are the males. They're chunky, with huge eyes that meet on top of the head, and they have no sting. Drones don't forage or make honey. Their one job is to mate with a young queen from another colony, and those that succeed die doing it. In autumn, when food gets scarce, the workers push the remaining drones out of the hive.
Egg to bee
Every bee starts as an egg in a wax cell. Workers, drones and queens take different amounts of time to grow:
EggLarva, fed by nursesCapped over, changing into a bee
The difference between a queen and a worker is food. Any fertilised egg can become either. Larvae in a large, peanut-shaped queen cell are fed a rich diet of royal jelly all the way through, and grow into a queen in just 16 days.
See it for yourself
In Hive Mind, the hive panel shows how many adult bees, foragers and brood the colony has as the year goes on. Leave it running from spring into summer and watch the numbers climb.
To see where they all are, open the hive and lift out the frames one at a time. Try to find the queen among her workers, and the eggs she's just laid.