How long do bees live?

The honey bee: three answers in one colony

A single honey bee colony contains individuals with radically different lifespans, all with the same genome. A summer worker lives around five to six weeks. A winter worker, produced from the same eggs in the same colony a few weeks later, lives four to six months. A queen lives two to five years. A drone lives a few weeks and dies immediately if he succeeds at the one thing he exists for.

Bumblebees: one season, four roles

• Workers live roughly two to six weeks, and like honey bee foragers they mostly wear out rather than age out.
• Males live two to four weeks after leaving the nest, and never return to it.
• The old queen dies in autumn with the rest of the colony, having lived perhaps a year in total.
• New queens are the exception: mated in late summer, they hibernate alone for six to nine months and found a colony the following spring, giving a total lifespan of around a year — most of it spent underground doing nothing.

Solitary bees: a year asleep and a month awake

The great majority of the world's bees are solitary, and their lifespans invert the intuition. A red mason bee lives about a year, and spends ten to eleven months of it as a fully formed adult sealed inside a cocoon in a tube. Her active adult life — flying, feeding, building, laying — is four to six weeks, and she dies before any of her offspring hatch. She never meets them.

The same shape holds across mining bees, leafcutters, plasterer bees and most of the rest: a brief, intense, entirely solitary working life inside a long dormancy. It is why the flowering window matters so much for these species. A honey bee colony that misses a flow has other weeks; a solitary bee that emerges into three weeks of rain has spent her entire adult life.

Why the numbers differ so much

Every one of these lifespans is an answer to the same question: what has to be survived? A perennial honey bee colony needs individuals capable of crossing a winter, so it makes them in autumn. An annual bumblebee colony needs only a queen to cross it, so only she is built for it. A solitary bee has no colony at all, so the whole burden of continuity falls on a dormant adult in a sealed cell.

Which is why the answer to 'how long does a bee live' is a question about which bee, in what season, doing what job — and why a single number would be less informative than no number at all.