Every honey bee family has females, males, and 1 queen. Most of the 50,000 bees in a hive are female workers with a sting. There are only a few hundred male drones with stocky bodies and no sting. The queen is the biggest bee, with a long body and a sting.

Multi-tasking females

A female bee lives for about 6 weeks, but it’s a full life because she’s always changing jobs. She begins as an egg the size of the dot on this letter i – a larva hatches, spins a cocoon and transforms into an adult bee (24 days later). Then the busyness begins: a worker bee is a cleaner, babysitter, builder, chef, queen-groomer, air-conditioner, guard, undertaker, farmer, and scout. Her most exhausting job is visiting flowers to get food.  A bee flies about 1000 km in her life, but it wears out her wings. Then she dies.

Lazy Drones

Male bees spend most of their time eating honey. Drones even do their droppings in the hive and the females clean up after them. (Female bees always go to the toilet outside).When winter kicks in, the drones are kicked out. They exist only to mate with a new queen – which doesn’t happen often – then die shortly after.

HRH, The Queen

The Queen bee is Her Royal Highness. She’s constantly guarded, fed and groomed by her daughters. She lays up to 2000 eggs a day in the  comb. and lives for 3 to 5 years.  Any girl bee can become a queen. When the queen gets old, the workers prepare a royal baby by feeding one larva  royal jelly – it transforms an ordinary bee into a queen.

Honey bees are one of the 25 000 species of bee. They are the most advanced because they are social and store food. Being social means working together to create a permanent home; and storing honey means they can survive almost anywhere on Earth.

Photo: Big-eyed drones sunbathing outside my hive.

Here’s another unbeelievable photo by Sarah Anderson (visit her bee blog). This is a new bee hatching: