This information is taken without permission from a wonderful poster from the Maxant Bee Keeping Supply Company, produced by William T. Maxant of Ayer, Mass., and illustrated by William J. Wallace. In the spirit of a picture being worth a thousand words, I cannot recommend this graphical aid in the art and science of bee keeping enough. I suggest deep study of the information contained herein.
| Days spent as a pre-hatched bee by a | ||
| Drone | Worker | Queen |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 4 | 4 | 4 |
| 5 | 5 | 5 |
| 6 | 6 | 6 |
| 7 | 7 | 7 |
| 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 9 | 9 | 9 |
| 10 | 10 | 10 |
| 11 | 11 | 11 |
| 12 | 12 | 12 |
| 13 | 13 | 13 |
| 14 | 14 | 14 |
| 15 | 15 | 15 |
| 16 | 16 | 16 |
| 17 | 17 | |
| 18 | 18 | |
| 19 | 19 | |
| 20 | 20 | |
| 21 | 21 | |
| 22 | ||
| 23 | ||
| 24 | ||
| Period as egg |
| Period as larva feeding |
| Larve spins cocoon and transforms under a closed cap |
| Bee emerges from cell |
It's interesting to see that the queen is the quickest to grow from egg to functioning adult. Obviously, evolutionary pressures have selected for queens that mature earlier so as to quickly replace a queen who has died. This would insure that the population of a hive would spend the minimal amount of time in decrease, and thus increase the likelihood of hive survival.
| Worker Bee Function from date of hatching | ||
| Hive Bee | 1 2 | Cleaning cells and keeping brood warm |
| 3 4 5 | Feeding older larve | |
| 6 7 8 9 10 11 | Feeding younger larve | |
| 12 13 14 15 16 17 | Producing wax, building combs, and transporting food and nectar within the hive | |
| 18 19 20 21 | Guarding Hive entrance | |
| Field Bee | 22-34 end of life | Visiting flowers, collection of pollen, nectar, propolis, and water |
Bees do not rely terribly much on their sense of sight. The inside of a bee hive or colony is almost always dark, except for when the bee keeper disassembles the hive and lets the light in! They do see some colors, and the flowers that attract bees use these colors to draw the bees to the nectar. They also use the polarized light as it filters through the atmosphere to find their way back to the hive. Instead, bees communicate mostly by vibration. A sophisticated dance is performed by a foraging honey bee, telling other foragers where particularly rich nectar spots are located.
Bees don't really sleep. They do not forage at night, but mostly because it's too cold for them to fly. They do kind of hibernate over the winter, reducing their activities to a minimum required to keep the hive warm. During this time, the bees will shift their position in the center of the hive so that everybody (except the queen) contributes to keeping the hive the proper temperature.
Male bees (drones) are kicked out of the hive in the late fall. As they do not help maintain the health of the hive, their presence would serve as a drain on the hive's resources. Their lives are sacrificed so that the stores of honey and pollen will go to maintain the colony.
The nectar of approximately two million flowers is required for one pound of honey. This entailes a total flight of over 55,000 miles by thousands of bees, as each adult foraging bee can only achieve about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey during her entire life. A single bee will visit 50 to 100 flowers to gather nectar on each trip before returning to the hive.
A honey bee can fly about 15 miles an hour.
It would take the energy of about an ounce of honey to enable a bee to fly around the world (provided that she could live that long!)
And while you're out and about, flitting from one bee keeping page to another, check out my page on the different strains of honeybees...