Life Cycle of Bees
Bees gather nectar to make honey and pollinate vegetables, flowers and fruits that make them essential to our ecosystem. The life cycle of all bees includes the four stages of egg laying, larva, pupa and adulthood. Members of a bee colony work together as a community to see that each bee egg survives to adulthood. The European honey bee and the bumble bee are common bees found in home gardens.
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Life Cycle
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Hives contain colonies of bees with a complete social structure. Bees go through four phases in their life cycle. The queen lays sausage-shaped eggs, which look like poppy seeds, into the comb. Three days after the eggs are laid, they hatch into larva. Worker bees feed the larva bee bread, which is a mixture of honey, pollen, and milk. The larva then spins a cocoon around its body. The larva stage runs from day 4 through 9.
The pupa stage occurs from day 10 to 23. The larva inside of the cocoon turns into a pupa. It develops legs, wings and eyes. When the bee achieves full growth, it will chew its way out of the cocoon as an adult bee.
Hive Social Structure
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Darker honey is more flavorful, while light colored honey is mild. Bees live within a tightly structured social order. Hives contain one queen, worker bees (females) and male bees (drones). Colonies of managed bees may contain 80,000 bees and feral (wild) hives may have 20,000 bees.
Drone bees mate with the queen and her job is to produce eggs. Drones live about 8 weeks, while the queen will live for 2 to 5 years. The queen's diet consists of royal jelly, which is attributable to her long life span. The female worker bees live for about 6 weeks and perform all necessary housekeeping functions within the hive.
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Queen
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Bees gather nector and humans benefit when they pollinate and fertilize plants. Young queens will leave the hive and mate with at least 10 drones over several days. She stores all their sperm, which will last for the rest of her life, in a spermatheca. There are no further occurrences of mating; she uses the stored sperm to lay eggs until she runs out of sperm and begins laying infertile eggs.
Queens are replaced in emergencies, such as failing health, laying infertile eggs or swarming. New queens are created in a special wax cell with eight fertilized eggs. The eggs and larvae are covered with royal jelly, which is a hormone-rich vitamin goop that transforms a regular bee into a queen.
The first queen to emerge will try to destroy her sister queens by stinging and killing the original queen, if she is still alive. Swarming is the method used by hives to reproduce a new colony at a new location.
Drone
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A queen bee can lay 2,000 eggs per day. Drones (males) are quite large in size in comparison to workers or the queen. They do not help to gather food, make wax, clean or care for young, and they cannot fly well.
The only purpose of a drone’s life is to mate with a queen. Drones spend most of the day congregating in a designated place, hoping to mate with a queen. After mating with a queen they are killed by her. Typically, males only live for 50 days and to conserve food in the fall, all males and are evicted from the hive by worker bees.
Worker
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Average honey consumption is 1.3 pounds per person, per year. Worker bees are aptly named, because they literally work themselves to death. Bees born to the worker class are assigned a variety of tasks based on their age and abilities, which include cleaning the hive, making combs, storing honey, feeding new broods, gathering honey and pollen or guarding the entrance to the hive.
The life expectancy of a worker bee is about 6 weeks. With the many assorted duties that they perform tirelessly, they eventually die. Their wings become too shredded to even fly or gather food.
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- Photo Credit flower and bees image by blaine stiger from Fotolia.com bee bees apises beehive hive insect image by Pali A from Fotolia.com Swarm of bees image by Mykola Velychko from Fotolia.com bee on flowers image by starush from Fotolia.com Bee hovering near a white flower image by Scott Latham from Fotolia.com honey bee image by Rikker from Fotolia.com
