Social Organization of Honey Bees

A honey bee colony is organised around a strict division of labour among three interdependent castes, normally one queen, 10,000 to 30,000 workers and a few hundred drones. The queen is the colony's sole functional female, feeding exclusively on royal jelly, and her only job is to lay eggs continuously throughout her two-to-four-year life span, during which she can lay around 15 lakh eggs in total; she mates just once, during a single winter event called the nuptial flight, in which she is followed by several drones drawn to a pheromone she releases, and if her egg-laying capacity later fails, a worker bee is fed royal jelly and develops into her replacement. Workers are sterile females, the smallest caste but the true engine of the colony; each develops from egg to adult in about 21 days inside a worker cell and lives roughly six weeks, spending the first half of her life as a nurse bee on indoor duties (secreting royal jelly, preparing bee-bread, feeding the queen and drones, secreting wax, building comb, cleaning and fanning the hive) before becoming first a guard and then, in her final three weeks, a forager gathering pollen, nectar, propolis and water. Workers also convert nectar into honey: their long tubular tongue draws sugary nectar from flowers into the stomach, where the enzyme invertase converts it into honey, both extending its storage life and adding to its medicinal value. The drone is the colony's functional male, developing from an unfertilized egg and living in a drone cell; wholly de …