The Colony
Beekeeping Fundamentals
Course 1 · Chapter 2 · The Colony: Queen, Workers and Drones
A beekeeper does not really keep individual bees; they keep a colony. Beekeeping Fundamentals 1 introduced the craft and the hive. This chapter looks inside: the three kinds of bee, how each is produced, how a colony reproduces, and what an individual bee's life looks like. Everything here is needed before Beekeeping Fundamentals 3 (equipment) and Beekeeping Fundamentals 5 (the beekeeping year) make sense.
One Colony, Three Kinds of Bee
Wikipedia's Western honey bee article describes a colony made up of a queen, workers and drones. It also says western honey bee colonies are perennial: unlike most other bee species, they persist year after year. Because of this permanence the article says a colony can be considered a superorganism, meaning the colony rather than the individual bee is the biologically significant unit.
| Queen | Worker | Drone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sex | Female, fertile | Female, usually infertile | Male |
| Main job | Lays all the eggs | Everything else: nursing, building, guarding, foraging | Mates with a new queen |
| Grown from | Fertilised egg, fed royal jelly throughout | Fertilised egg, switched to pollen and nectar after day 3 | Unfertilised egg in a larger cell |
| Sting | Yes, not barbed | Yes, barbed | None |
| Fate | Lives years | Weeks to months | Dies after mating, or expelled before winter |
Queen
Larger than a worker, with a rounder, longer abdomen. She may lay over 2,500 eggs a day at the height of the season, according to the article.
Worker
A female who carries out the colony's main tasks while the queen only reproduces.
Drone
A male, about 1.5 times the size of a worker, who does not forage or sting.
How a Queen Becomes a Queen
The article says a female egg can become either a queen or a worker. Both are fed royal jelly during the first three days. After that, prospective workers are switched to a mix of pollen and nectar, while prospective queens keep receiving royal jelly. Queens are not raised in ordinary horizontal brood cells: a queen cell is larger and vertical. At the height of the season a queen fertilises each egg with stored sperm as she lays it in a worker-sized cell; eggs laid in larger, drone-sized cells are left unfertilised and develop into drones.
Three reasons for a new queen
| Trigger | Name | What happens (per the article) |
|---|---|---|
| Hive filled with honey, little room for eggs | Swarming | Old queen leaves with part of the workers; a new queen stays with the rest |
| Old queen failing, queen pheromone falling | Supersedure | Colony raises a new queen; the old queen is usually killed |
| Old queen dies suddenly | Emergency supersedure | Workers choose eggs or larvae of the right age and feed them royal jelly |
Swarming: How a Colony Reproduces
The article says colonies reproduce by swarming, usually in spring and early summer when flowers are abundant. The hive creates one to two dozen new queens; just before they emerge, the old queen and a large share of the workers leave to find a new home. In the old colony the daughter queens fight until one remains, and she then goes on one or more mating flights, mating with 1 to 17 drones each time, usually within two weeks of emerging. She then stays in the hive to lay.
To see what the two figures mean, take the article's midsummer population of 40,000 to 80,000 bees and apply each fraction by hand (I also ran a one-line calculation to confirm):
| Colony size | Leaves at two-thirds | Stays at one-third | Leaves at one-half |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40,000 | about 26,667 | about 13,333 | 20,000 |
| 80,000 | about 53,333 | about 26,667 | 40,000 |
These sums treat all of the colony's bees as workers, which slightly overstates the numbers because the article does not say what share of the 40,000 to 80,000 are drones or brood (check).
Inside the Individual Bee's Life
The article says the western honey bee has four life stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. Because of the colony's social structure all four stages occur at the same time through much of the year. The queen lays a single egg in each cell. The legless, eyeless larva is fed by nurse bees; after about a week the nurses seal it in its cell and it begins its pupal stage; after another week it emerges as an adult. A worker's job changes with age:
| Worker age (days) | Typical task (per the article) |
|---|---|
| First 10 | Cleaning the hive and feeding larvae |
| After that | Building comb cells |
| 16 to 20 | Receiving nectar and pollen from older workers and storing it |
| After day 20 | Leaves the hive and works as a forager for the rest of life |
| Bee | Lifespan (per the article) |
|---|---|
| Queen | Average 3 to 5 years in most subspecies; up to 8 reported for one subspecies; beekeepers often replace queens every year or two |
| Spring and summer worker | Only a few weeks |
| Autumn worker | Several months, staying inside as the colony clusters |
| Whole worker population | About 1% die naturally per day; all replaced about every four months |
Those last two figures can be cross-checked. If 1% died every day for 120 days (about four months), the share who had died would be 1 minus 0.99 to the power 120, about 70% (I computed this). That is not "all replaced", but the article's figures are rough averages, and the colony is also growing and shrinking over the year, so a gap is not alarming (check).
What This Means for a Beekeeper
Several of the article's facts matter directly for how beekeeping works. The queen lays all the eggs, so a failing queen is a colony-wide problem, and the article says her sperm store depletes near the end of her life, so she lays more unfertilised eggs. That is why beekeepers often replace queens every year or two. A swarm also takes a large part of the workforce away, which is why Beekeeping Fundamentals 6 treats swarm control as a main spring task. Using the beekeeper's viewpoint to rank those priorities is my own interpretation (check).
Not Yet Verified, and Sources
- Source. Everything attributed to "the article" comes from the plain-text version of Wikipedia's Western honey bee article (about 54,500 characters). I read the colony life cycle, individual life cycle and social caste sections (queens, workers and drones). The rest (behaviour, communication, products, genome, microbiome, hazards, immunity and others) was not read, so nothing from it appears here.
- Conflict. Swarm share: two-thirds in one section, about half in another. Not resolved.
- Not in that part. The roughly three-week egg-to-adult figure and the "overstated" population caveat (check); the point about which tasks matter most to a beekeeper (check).
- Arithmetic. The swarm numbers and the 1%-per-day cross-check are my own calculations on the article's figures, run in Python and matching the tables above.
Exercises
A colony has 60,000 bees in midsummer. Using each of the article's two swarm fractions (two-thirds and one-half), work out how many bees leave and how many stay. Then say which figure you would use for a plan and why, given the source disagrees with itself.
Make a day-by-day timeline for a worker from day 1 to day 25 using the article's task table, marking where each job changes. Then answer: on day 12, which task is the worker most likely doing, and what does the article not say about days 11 to 15?
For each of the following, say whether it produces a queen, a worker or a drone, and give the article's reason: (a) a fertilised egg fed royal jelly for three days then pollen and nectar; (b) an unfertilised egg laid in a large cell; (c) a fertilised egg in a vertical queen cell fed royal jelly throughout.
Quick Reference
- Colony: one queen, workers (female), drones (male); perennial
- Queen: lays all eggs; may lay over 2,500 a day; lives years
- Worker: fertilised egg; nurse, builder, storer, forager; weeks to months
- Drone: unfertilised egg; no sting; mates with a new queen
- New queen: swarming, supersedure, emergency supersedure
- Stages: egg, larva, pupa, adult
- Check: swarm share, egg-to-adult time, population caveat