Honey Bee Life Cycle
Within this time, however, the honey bees have very distinct duties, which she or he carries out completely by instinct. To understand the honey bee life cycle better, it is best to define each according to the social status they are born into. Being that honey bees are highly social insects, with an extremely sophisticated hierarchy, they are born into three distinct social classes: The Worker (female) is usually fully developed at around twenty four days. The Drone (male) usually develops into adulthood around twenty to twenty four days. The Queen (female) and mother to all develops into a fully grown adult at around fifteen days. The honey bee life cycles of all three are quite different. While a worker bee may live up to one hundred and forty days, depending upon the weather, a drone will generally have a shorter lifespan and a queen honeybee a much larger one. Understanding the duties of each honey bee during their life cycle helps to explain this further. Mostly female, worker bees undergo a 21- 24 day metamorphosis to reach adulthood. This transformation takes place in four distinct phases, which are common to all honey bees.
The egg is the size of a grain of sand or a comma (,) and it does have a mouth. It is roughly one millimetre long. The larva stage is reached after three days when the egg hatches. The pupa is inactive and is fed royal jelly for three days then a mixture of pollen and honey for a further six days. During this fourteen day stage it grows into a bee, the queen honeybee decides which type of bee and finally it emerges from within a wax capped cell around the twentieth day. The adult stages of a honey bee life cycle differ quite a lot depending on their status. Born sterile, female workers build the colony's hive and then spend their entire lives keeping it clean, in good repair with the use of Propolis. They keep the hive cool at around 94 degrees F by collecting water which they deposit around the hive and then vigorously fan with their wings causing it to evaporate, and safe from intruders. She also exists to care for the young, the drones and the queen honeybee. In caring for them all, she must forage for nectar and pollen, make their food (including royal jelly) and make the wax necessary to cap the cells that hold the pupa. She takes her job very seriously and generally works herself to death within 20 to 40 days in the summertime or 140 days during winter months. She certainly has a tough life cycle, very busy little bee! The drone, on the other hand, is a male bee born without a stinger and who was specially created to fertilize a virgin queen's eggs. Drones are born of the queen's unfertilized eggs and are royally taken care of until it is time for them to mate. Rarely do they have need to leave a hive as worker bees tend to them by feeding them royal jelly, the same meal enjoyed by the queen. A drone must mate with a virgin queen by the fall (Autumn) or he is ejected from the hive. However, when he does mate with a queen, he dies immediately afterwards as his endophallus (this is his reproductive organ, the penis) is ripped from his body, this remains attached to the queen he has just fertilized and his abdomen bursts open. (Ouch, painful!) Some drones appear to survive instant death after mating with the queen which takes place whilst in flight, (these are seasonal mating flights) however, because he has served his purpose he is thrown out of the hive as he has no further use! The queen is thought to mate with at least seven drones in under fifteen minutes and she can store their sperm for the rest of her life cycle. Depending upon when a drone reaches adulthood, and whether or not he mates, he may live between 21 and 32 days in the spring, up to 90 days in the summer and by the winter he has either died from mating or as a result of lacking the necessary body parts to gather his own food after being evicted. Adult queens live the longest of all bees. With a life cycle that averages approximately a year and a half, some queens have lived as many as six years but this usually varies between three to five years and a beekeeper prefers to change his queen every three years. Upon reaching adulthood an adult queen immediately kills all unhatched queen eggs, newly hatched queens and even, sometimes, her own mother. Upon her first day as queen, she begins mating and laying eggs. She flies to a site where thousands of drones will be waiting for her. Every day thereafter she will lay between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs for the rest of her life. When her egg production stops or slows down, worker bees will move her most recent eggs to an awaiting queen cell and await the birth of her replacement where the honey bee life cycle starts all over again. Totally fascinating is the honey bee life cycle and one that is extremely important to our survival too. Without them there would be very few flowers and most importantly of all, very few food crops of which we all depend.
Honey Bee Life Cycle back to Bee Keeping
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