Imagine for a moment that you are not going to live for years, there’s nothing wrong with you but you will not be alive this time next year.
Hard to imagine without resorting to words like terrorism or war but for some creatures life happens but for the twinkling of the eye.
A bee for example will live for about 6 weeks (unless it’s winter) and of that six weeks will only spend a few weeks in the world (if at all).
So how then does a bee live, what are it’s developmental stages?
Before continuing it is perhaps worth noting that I will be talking about male bees (drones), female bees (workers) and the queen – the development stages vary but there is an underlying commonality.
A Bee is Born – Hoorah!
The queen bee is steered around the frame by the workers, they effectively determine where she will lay – and then she pops an egg into the perfectly engineered chamber.
Notice that in the image below the eggs appear to be grouped around the centre of the frame, this is because they are females. If there were any eggs at the bottom of the frame they would be male.
Typically, in a well formed frame the very top of the frame would have a border of honey (typically a few centimetres tall surrounding the top of the egg cluster), this then enables them to keep the food where they’re going to need it later.
The male cells are typically at the bottom of the frame as they are slightly bigger than the female cells and this leads to an irregular formation in the wax – the bees don’t seem to like this concept in their brood management.
Whilst I have now explained that the different sexes are seeded in regimented locations with a given frame it is perhaps now understandable from a bee keeping perspective that finding males mixed in with the female brood is something that should trigger closer inspection (because it could be a visually recognisable symptom of an underlying problem).
So, we have an egg – and it’s sitting in the middle of the frame – it’s a girl!
Well, yes and no.
It could be a girl, but equally it could be a new queen.
This probably sounds a little strange but if the colony needs a new queen they will take an egg which is 2,3 or 4 days old and feed it more royal jelly than a normal worker – this then ensures that the egg will start developing into a queen (the diet is the main factor for creating a queen).
The egg will then develop into a larva and after some time this then develops into a pupa.
For a queen this period of larva is anything upto 8.5 days whereas for a male it’s upto 9.5 and for a worker it’s upto 9 days.
When the larva become a pupa it is capped (the cell is sealed).
The baby bee will now develop, if it’s a queen it takes about 8 days where as a male or worker will take 10 days.
Interestingly enough a hive will make as many queens as the food supply allows for – although each hive can have only one queen.
This then leads to a rather ugly situation – the first one out seeks out the others and ensures that she is the ‘only’ queen in the hive.
So at this point it’s taken
18 days to make a queen
21 days to make a worker
24 days to make a drone
The queen will not be fertile for about another week.
The drone and worker bee will spend the first few days begging for honey from other bees, after this period the worker bees will begin to take part in normal chores such as cleaning the chambers ready for the queen to lay fresh eggs.
As time goes on the worker bee will perform more tasks such as feeding the larva and construction of new wax.
After being in the hive for a week or two the worker may then leave the hive on foraging duty. She will then last for three weeks (which in spring and early summer will be a REALLY BUSY three weeks).
The drone will last about 7 weeks all in all or until he breeds with another hives queen (at which point he will die). Whilst he’s not breeding he’ll be on perimeter guard duty for the hive.
If during his life food stocks dwindle and food resources become scarce he will be evicted by the workers.
On the flip side there’s the queen, she will live for upto three years – although in bee keeping terms in the third year she will be approaching useless (she’ll weaken and the colony will potentially become more aggressive, she might even start laying only male eggs.
I’ll write another article specifically about queens and how we manage them (didn’t want to make this article to heavy).
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