Queen, workers and drones

Anne's second inspection. She has read that you should find the queen, so she spends twenty minutes turning every frame, peering at thousands of bees. She never finds her. By the end the bees are restless, Anne is sweating, and she closes the hive worried that her colony is queenless. It isn't. She was looking for the wrong thing.

To know what to look for, you need to know who is in the box. A honey bee colony has three kinds of bee. One queen. Thousands of workers. And, in late spring and summer, a few hundred drones. Each has a different body, a different job, and a different life.

Start with the queen. She is the only fully developed female in the colony, and her job is to lay eggs. At her peak she can lay well over fifteen hundred eggs a day, and the University of Guelph's research centre puts the upper figure at around two thousand. She is longer than a worker, with a long abdomen, and she is surprisingly easy to lose among forty thousand bees.

A queen takes sixteen days to develop, from egg to adult. In her first couple of weeks out of the cell, she flies out to mate, with up to fourteen or so drones. That is the only mating period of her life. She stores what she collects and uses it for years. A few days after mating ends, she starts to lay.

How long does a queen last? She can survive for several years, but most are productive for two or three. After that, even a healthy queen lays less, which is why beekeepers eventually replace them. We will come back to that in the lecture on queens.

Now the workers. Every worker is female. She takes twenty one days to develop. In summer, a worker's whole adult life is only about six weeks, and she spends it working, and her job changes as she ages.

Young workers stay inside. They clean cells, feed the growing brood, look after the queen, handle incoming nectar, build wax comb, guard the entrance and fan air through the hive. Older workers become foragers, flying out for nectar, pollen, water, and the resin that bees turn into propolis.

Here is something every Ontario beekeeper needs to understand. The workers raised in late summer and fall are different. These winter bees can survive four to six months, long enough to carry the colony through to spring. How healthy they are decides whether your colony makes it. Remember that when we get to mites.

And the drones. Drones are male. They take twenty four days to develop, the longest of the three. They are big, with large eyes, and they don't sting. Their only job is to mate with a queen from another colony, and they may fly up to five kilometres to find one. A drone that mates dies. In the fall, the workers push the remaining drones out of the hive.

One more fact, and it is the one that surprises people. A queen and a worker begin as exactly the same kind of egg. The difference is food. A larva that will become a queen is fed royal jelly for her whole development. A worker larva gets it only at the start. Drones come from unfertilized eggs.

That is why a colony that loses its queen can make a new one, as long as it has young larvae. The workers pick a few and feed them as queens. If they have to start with older larvae, the new queens are often smaller.

The first stage of every bee is an egg, and an egg hatches into a larva after three days. Keep that number in mind.

Now let's change one fact. Suppose Anne had spent those twenty minutes looking for eggs instead of the queen. Eggs sit in the bottom of the cells, one per cell in a healthy colony. If she sees fresh eggs, she knows a queen was laying there within the last three days. Colony queenright. Inspection done. She doesn't need to see the queen at all.

The mistake beginners make is hunting for the queen on every visit. It takes too long, it upsets the bees, and it risks crushing her. Look for eggs and young larvae instead. They tell you everything the queen would.

Here is the rule, in one breath. A colony is one egg-laying queen, thousands of female workers whose jobs change with age, and a few hundred drones in summer; queens take sixteen days, workers twenty one and drones twenty four, and fresh eggs prove you have a queen.

Next, we follow the colony through a whole Ontario year, from winter cluster to winter cluster.