Inside a honey bee colony

The queen

One per colony, longer-bodied than a worker, and effectively an egg-laying organ for the superorganism. At peak season she lays more than a thousand eggs a day, exceeding her own body weight, and she does almost nothing else — she is fed, groomed and cleaned by attendants throughout.

She mates once, in a period of a few days early in life, flying to a drone congregation area and mating with a dozen or more drones from other colonies. She stores their sperm in a spermatheca and uses it for the rest of her life, which may be several years. She never mates again, and a queen who fails to mate successfully cannot be fixed.

The workers

Sterile females, and everything the colony does. Their work is organised by age rather than assignment, in a sequence that broadly runs from the centre of the nest outwards over about six weeks.

1. 1Days 1-3 — cell cleaningCleaning and polishing cells so the queen will lay in them. The first job, and done at the centre of the brood nest where it is warmest.
2. 2Days 3-12 — nursingFeeding larvae. Hypopharyngeal glands are active, producing the royal jelly that all larvae get for their first days and that queens continue to receive throughout.
3. 3Days 12-18 — building and food handlingWax glands come online and the bee builds comb, caps cells, and receives and ripens nectar from foragers.
4. 4Days 18-21 — guardingAt the entrance, checking arrivals by scent. Bees from other colonies are challenged; a robber attempting to steal stores is fought.
5. 5Days 21-42 — foragingOutside for the rest of her life, collecting nectar, pollen, water and resin. Foraging is what kills her — flight wears out wings and the metabolic cost is severe.

Winter bees are a separate case. Bees raised in autumn are physiologically different — fatter, with more stored protein — and live for months rather than weeks. They are the ones that get the colony to spring.

The drones

Males, produced from unfertilised eggs, and so having a mother but no father. Larger and blunter than workers, with enormous eyes that meet at the top of the head. They cannot sting, cannot forage, cannot make wax and cannot feed themselves efficiently.

Their single function is mating, and a successful drone dies in the act — his endophallus is torn away. Most are not successful. In autumn, when mating season is over, workers stop feeding the drones and drag them out of the hive to die. It is abrupt and it is not cruelty: a colony carrying several hundred non-productive males through winter would not reach spring.

Caste is made by food, not by genetics

A fertilised honey bee egg can become a worker or a queen. The eggs are the same; what differs is diet. All larvae are fed royal jelly for their first few days. Those the colony intends as queens continue to receive it throughout development, and the result is a larger, fertile, long-lived insect that develops faster — about sixteen days from egg to adult against twenty-one for a worker.