What Do Bees Do? ~ Part Two of Bee Series

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Inside the hive the worker bee function in several roles. They feed the young bees and take care of them while also cleaning and expanding the hive. They are also foragers and scouts who seek out new hive locations and bring back food. All male bees are drones with the female being a worker or a queen. The drone bee has only one job, to mate with the queen. Workers do 85% of the work, collecting both nectar and pollen. Worker bees can lay eggs but they are destined to not be fertilized and this means those eggs will become drones. The Queen releases a pheromone that suppresses the worker bee's ability to develop the appropriate reproductive apparatus. The worker bee has a life expectancy of around 5-6 weeks and has many roles to perform inside the hive. Tasks inside the colony depend on age and so a worker will perform all jobs in a given life cycle. It takes about 21 days for a bee to develop in the hexagonal cell of the honeycomb. Her first job after developing into an adult bee is to clean out the cell in which she grew. Then she becomes a nurse to the larvae, feeding them, cleaning them, and cleaning their cells. In 12 to 20 days she moves to cleaning, producing wax, building comb, storing nectar and pollen, warming or cooling the hive, removing dead bodies, and guarding the entrance as well as tending to the queen. At about 20 days the worker becomes a forager. She brings back pollen as well as water used for cooling the hive and tree resin used to make propolis. The worker has about 500 miles of flight in her wings before they give out and she dies.