The Bees
There are three types of adult bees within a colony; queen, drone, and worker. Each bee plays an important part in the development and survival of the colony. There are thousands of worker bees cooperating to build the hive, gather nectar and pollen, and rear the brood. An individual bee can not survive without the other bees of the colony.
The bees communicate by the use of pheromones and dances to control the various functions and activities within the colony. The task performed by the worker bee is determined by age. The strength of the colony depends on the queen, the amount of food stores gathered by the workers, and the size of the work force. The more workers, the more effective the colony until a maximum size of about 60,000 workers.
The Queen
The queen is the only sexually developed female bee within a colony and there is usually only one queen per hive. The are times when another queen might be found, during supercedure (replacing of an old queen) or when the hive is preparing to swarm.
The queen exists mainly to lay eggs and during the peak of production may lay 1500 eggs per day. She produces both fertilized and unfertilized eggs and lays the greatest number of eggs during spring and early summer. The queen will reduce the number of eggs she lays in October and produces few or no eggs until next spring.
The queen is easily to distinguish from the other bees in the colony. Her body is longer and during egg production, her abdomen is elongated. Her wings are short compared to a drone or worker and cover only a third of her abdomen. She has no pollen baskets or functional wax glands. Her stinger is smoother and curved, and longer than that of a worker.
The queen also produces pheromones, which act as a social glue - each queen has her own scent and that is how bees know to which colony they belong. One of the major pheromones is called queen substance.
The queens are laid in a special, larger cell called a queen cell. The queen takes 16 days to develop from an egg, the shortest time of the three types. One week after emerging from the queen cell, she will leave the hive to mate with several drones from other colonies. The mating takes about 13 minutes and this is the only time she mates. Within 48 hours after mating she will begin to lay eggs and she will fertilize the eggs with sperm as she goes from the spermatheca.
A queen can live for several years until she is replaced by the hive. Typically, a beekeeper will replace the queen every two years to maintain a strong hive.
The Drone
The drone is the largest bee in the colony and the only type that are male. They are only present from late spring and summer. Drones have no stinger, pollen baskets, or wax glands. The exist mainly to fertilize a virgin queen from another colony. Drones die instantly upon mating. They perform no useful function in the hive, but their presence is believed to be important for the hive to function normally.
Drones eat three times as much as workers and could put a strain on a colony’s food supply. When cold weather begins in the fall and pollen and nectar supplies become scare, drones are forced out of the hive and left to starve.
The Worker
The worker bee is the smallest adult and most numerous within a colony. All the workers are sexually undeveloped females and under normal conditions do not lay eggs. Workers have special body parts that enable them to collect pollen and nectar, and to create wax. They perform all the labor required within the colony. They clean cells, feed brood, tend to the queen, remove dead bees and brood, build comb, ventilate the hive, guard the entrance, and finally, forage for pollen, nectar, and sap.
The worker lives about six weeks during summer. In the fall and winter, a worker might live as long as six months. The workers that survive through the winter will tend to the brood in early spring before they die.
