A bee colony, an extremely organized, sophisticated society, is made up of three castes (categories): A single fertile queen bee, hundreds of male drone bees and thousands of sterile female worker bees. A bee’s caste, as well as the time of year in which it was born, affects its lifespan. Summer workers have the shortest honey bee lifespan, while the queen bee outlives both other castes.
Life Span of Drone Bees
Adult drones have no useful purpose within the bee hive. They don’t provide food, feed the young or produce wax. In fact, they waste the colony’s resources and only serve one purpose: To mate with the queen bee. Drone bees first leave the hive six days after emerging from the pupal cell, flying to areas known for drone congregation and going back to the hive only when they have failed to mate. Successful maters die minutes or hours after mating with the queen, and the rest of the drone bees survive only as long as the worker bees allow them to. If there is a shortage of food, the worker bees kill or kick out the drones. Drone bees rarely survive the winter, as the worker bees want to protect their limited resources.
Life Span of Worker Bees
The first part of a worker’s life is spent working within the hive, while the last part is spent finding food and gathering pollen or nectar. Worker bees also gather water to use to cool the inside of the nest on hot days, and use water to dilute the honey before feeding it to the larvae. It is worker bees who are responsible for pollination: When they land on plants or flowers, they collect pollen dust all over their bodies, and then use their specially adapted legs to discard the pollen, leaving it on other plants.
During summer, worker bees only live for five to six weeks, purely because their heavy workload often gets the better of them. This is their most active time of the year, when they spend their days foraging for food, storing nectar, feeding larvae and producing honey. Worker bees live longer in winter – five months or more – because their fat supplies increase and their well-developed glands provide food for larvae.
Life Span of Queen Bees
The queen bee has a very important function within the colony, and has the longest life span by far. While the average life span of a queen bee is two to five years, queen bees have been known to live up to seven years, although this is rare. About a week after a new queen emerges from her cell, she goes on several flights in order to mate with as many as 20 drones. After the queen bee returns to lay her eggs, she will rarely leave the colony. Thereafter, the queen bee lays between 1,000 and 2,000 eggs a day inside the hive (she has enough sperm stored in her sperm pouch to enable her to fertilize her eggs for the rest of her life). If the queen bee fertilizes the egg, that egg will become female – a worker bee or a queen bee. However, if the queen bee does not fertilize the egg, it will become a male drone bee.
The queen’s survival in the difficult winter months depends largely on how viable her colony is. A strong group of worker bees protects the queen and regulates her temperature.
The worker bees keep a close eye on the queen bee to make sure she is up to her job