Looking back over my old posts I realised not only do I not have a post discussing what honey bees do within the hive, I don’t even have a dedicated post to differentiating the types of honey bee one can find in any given hive! Here we’re going to go a bit more in depth on what different bee castes do inside and outside the hive.

Drones

I figured I would start with drones since I do complain about them quite a bit and this explanation can be short and sweet. Drones are born when worker bees create comb cells slightly larger than the average worker bee or storage cell; the queen measures each one and thus knows which kind of egg to lay (either fertilised, creating a worker bee, or unfertilised, creating a drone). Inside the hive, drones literally can’t even feed or clean themselves, so they simply consume time and resources until it’s time to mate. If they fail to mate, they return to the hive where the worker bees will kill them for the Winter.

The Queen

The queen also can’t do much in the hive compared to her worker bee children. The queen lays eggs based on what cells the worker bees create, and she can feed herself, although it is common to see worker bees feeding her. Looking inside a hive, you’ll see the queen bee surrounded by a cluster of workers because of her arguably most important job––she lets out Queen Mandibular Pheromone (QMB). Among other things, QMB attracts worker bees to feed and groom her. Its presence also inhibits certain behaviours in workers, such as building queen cells (to rear new queens) and laying eggs. When QMB from a queen becomes too diluted to reach every worker in the hive, which would happen if the queen died, became to old, or if the population of the hive were too great, then the workers will begin building queen cells. This is what tells bees to prepare for swarming in the Spring.

Workers

Workers do different jobs based on their age. Some workers will stop at a particular job rather than progressing with their age group, unless hive pressures (such as lack of foragers) pushes them to mature. This is a genetic predisposition based on the DNA of the father. Queen bees hold the sperm of many different drones to allow genetic diversity in the hive, which assures a diverse cast of workers with different skills.

Days 1-2: the newly emerged bees work on cleaning the cells around where they emerged so that they cells can be reused for egg laying or food storage.

Days 3-11: now the worker bee becomes a nurse bee, performing a number of different tasks. Nurse bees are the only ones that can digest protein, so they digest brood food (pollen) brought back by foragers and digest it. Then they regurgitate it to feed all other bees in the hive. This is actual bee vomit (unlike honey, which technically goes into the crop, a sort of internal pocket, and does not progress to their proper stomach).

Days 12-17: advanced nurse bees continue their work but can now also produce royal jelly to create queen bees if necessary. If a queen is still present then these bees take over as the main feeders and groomers of the queen.

Days 12-22: these worker bees do a great variety of tasks. They can take nectar from foragers and help store it in a honey cell by fanning and chewing it to lower the water content. They can also help produce wax to create more cells or cap storage or egg cells. They can help spread propolis over the walls of the hive, creating a resin layer on the inside of the hive to act as an immune system against smaller insects and viruses. They can also act as guard bees to defend the front of the hive against predators or work as mortuary bees (my personal favourite). These bees find the dead bodies of others and remove them from the hive.

Days 22-42: this is when workers, on average, become foragers and can finally go out into the world.

After mentioning all of that I will add as a caveat that, as I hinted at before, hive pressures can speed or slow this process as needed. If many foragers die in a terrible rain storm one day, then the resulting lack of food will pressure nurse bees and other workers fewer than 22 days old to mature faster and become foragers. This is true of any job at any part of the growth cycle. This can be deadly, however, since one of the reasons this age dependent work line exists is because it allows the workers more time to mature within the hive (which especially helps their wings and stingers, which must go through keratin hardening). If the bees mature too fast they are more likely to die once outside, then putting more pressure on the remaining bees, and possibly leading to collapse in poor enough conditions.

The information for this post came from the following book:

Winston, Mark. The Biology of the Honey Bee. Harvard University Press, April 1991.