A queen bee in her colony
Just one look at the queen bee and you can tell she’s different. Her unique features speak to her most important task: egg production. Her elongated abdomen holds an enormous set of ovaries, which can produce as many as 1 million eggs in her surprisingly long lifetime. Unlike worker bees, who live approximately 42 days, the queen bee can live 5 years or more! Her longer body allows her to easily deposit eggs at the bottom of cells, a task she performs many times over.
A queen bee in her colony
It’s fascinating to watch her work as she glides across the combs in search of empty cells. A small team of worker bees follows in her wake, assigned to meet her every need. They feed her and clean her — they even carry her excrement out of the hive!
The queen rarely leaves her hive. She is too important to the survival of the colony and cannot be risked, for she is its sole means of reproduction. A colony without its queen will eventually collapse as its population ages. So, while the queen does possess a set of wings and a stinger, she does not take flight in search of food or sting in defense of her colony; these tasks fall to the workers. In fact, the only time a queen leaves her colony is to mate or to swarm.
The queen’s life span is often determined by her reproductive endurance and her output of pheromones. Workers will care only for a queen that is laying well and emitting strong pheromones. If the queen’s brood production begins to taper or if her pheromone levels weaken, the workers will raise a replacement and then kill their old queen.
A queen bee laying an egg
Worker bees tending bee larvae
Beekeepers often joke that male bees, or drones, are lazy because they don’t help out with any of the housework in the hive. They aim toward a singular goal in life: to mate with a queen. Per-haps it is unsurprising, then, that male honey bees are endowed with some of the largest genitalia, in proportion to body size, in the animal kingdom.
Depending on your climate, drones may be raised year-round, but they are most numerous in spring, during mating season. Drones reach sexual maturity about a week after emergence, and each afternoon in the spring they leave their hive in search of virgin queens from neighboring colonies. They fly to aerial sites called congregation zones, where they circle in wait for a passing queen.
It is not understood how or why they choose these mysterious mating locations, but a collection of drones from nearby colonies gathers at the same zones year after year. Should a queen appear, the drones will race toward her, competing against one another for the opportunity to mate.
When they are not attempting to mate with a queen, drones appear to do little else. They are often imagined to be lounging in the honey stores, begging their sisters for food. This unflattering picture has created a bias among beekeepers concerned about the economics of honey production in their apiaries. They believe the drones consume honey that might otherwise be harvested and give little in return.
But the representation of drones as useless layabouts is neither an accurate nor a fair portrayal of their role in the hive. Drones are known to boost colony morale, a catchall phrase that describes a number of positive influences they have within a colony, including increased honey production and healthier and more active worker bees.
They also contribute to temperature control in the hive. With their large body mass, drones have actually been shown to produce 1.5 times more heat than worker bees!
Drones also have a curious habit of spending time in colonies that are not their own. Worker bees are generally not permitted inside other colonies and will be attacked by guard bees if they try, but drones seem to be an exception. No one understands why this is, but it indicates that drones may play a more significant role in the colony than was once believed.
Novice observers sometimes confuse drones for queens because of their size. But when examined carefully, drones are easily recognized by their square butts, large powerful wings, and enormous eyes. These attributes increase their chances of mating with a queen — an act that is performed while in flight!
The successful drone meets an unfortunate fate, however: upon copulation, his penis explodes and detaches from his body, a fatal injury that ends his life. Though that may sound like an ignominious death, it beats the alternative. In late summer, workers eject all remaining drones from the hive, leaving them to die of exposure. Despite their merits, the colony cannot afford to feed and care for them when mating is not in season.
The representation of drones as useless layabouts is neither an accurate nor a fair portrayal of their role in the hive.
It is hypnotic to watch the constant commotion at a hive’s entrance. The bees display a surprising variance in grace as they lift off and land. Some will zip in and out of the hive with speedy precision, while others wobble visibly before they crash-land and lumber into the hive. The difference most likely lies in the kind of load the bees are carrying. Foraging can be heavy work!
A forager brings a load of pollen back to the hive.
Field bees gather a wide range of material for their colonies: nectar, pollen, water, tree sap, fungi . . . I’ve even seen them bring back the adhesive from duct tape! Though collectively the bees carry a diversity of materials back to the hive, each individual bee tends to specialize in collecting just one type of forage.
If you observe the honey bees in your garden, you may notice their preference for certain flowers over others. Bees seek out the blooms that are the richest in pollen and nectar. They especially love the sunflower family, herbs, and inflorescences — plants that grow clusters made up of many florets, like lilac or goldenrod, offering efficient foraging. A single bee may visit your garden as many as 15 times a day and collect only thyme nectar on each trip.
Honey bees are famous for making honey from the nectar they collect, but many humans don’t realize that they make it for themselves. It is their food! They extract nectar from flowers by means of a long, strawlike tongue called a proboscis. The nectar is then stored in the bee’s honey gut, where it will be partially digested and mixed with enzymes during transport. This specialized second stomach allows for easy regurgitation and is therefore ideal for transporting liquids like nectar, honey, or water.
When a forager bee returns to her hive full of nectar, she performs a nectar exchange with a young worker bee. The young bee receives not only the nectar but also the older bee’s beneficial gut bacteria, thought to be linked to individual bee health. Now full of nectar herself, the young bee begins the work of turning the nectar into honey, starting by depositing the sweet liquid into open beeswax cells. There the nectar will ripen, a process that reduces its water content from about 80 percent to about 18 percent.
The ripening of nectar occurs in two stages. First, the bee sips nectar from the cell and rolls the droplet out to the tip of her tongue, exposing it to the air. She does this repeatedly, pushing the droplet out and then sucking it back into her mouth. Each time she does, some of the moisture is lost and the nectar becomes more concentrated.
Once she has removed roughly half of the nectar’s water, she deposits the droplet back into a cell where it will undergo the final stage of dehydration. The bees help this second part of the process along by fanning their wings over the open honey cells. If you are ever lucky enough to be near a beehive while this behavior is going on inside, you may be able to smell their efforts. During a nectar flow and especially in the evenings when the foragers are home to help fan, an intoxicating scent wafts through the apiary. It is the warm exhalation of honey ripening.
Once it is viscous, the honey is sealed in its cell with a beeswax cap. The amount of time it takes the bees to ripen nectar into honey can vary based on climate, colony size, and the availability of comb. A large colony with favorable weather conditions may need only 1 day to convert nectar into honey, but on average the process takes 12 days.
The bees ripen many cells of honey at once and cap them all with large swaths of pristine white beeswax. These combs of capped honey make up the hive’s pantry. The bees build up their honey stores in the spring and summer, when flowers are plentiful, so they don’t go hungry during the winter months.
A worker bee sips honey through her proboscis.
Pollen, honey bees’ main source of protein, is collected with zeal in the spring when it is most abundant. Typically, bees forage within a mile of their hive, but will go greater distances to gather pollen. They mix it with small amounts of regurgitated nectar and roll it onto their back legs. There, wiry hairs and small notches become ingenious scraping tools that juggle the pollen back and forth until it has formed a large ball. A bee can carry two of these sticky pollen masses home at a time, one on each back leg.
A bee with pollen pants, on the author’s finger
I fondly refer to these large, colorful leg accessories as pollen pants. Pollen is usually associated with shades of yellow or orange, but in fact it comes in many different colors. I have seen bees wearing pollen pants in striking reds, rich berry tones, subtle greens, grays, and occasionally, my favorite — a deep purple.
Worker bees are practiced groomers and frequently spend a few seconds between flowers cleaning the pollen from their bodies. They are especially diligent about cleaning their two large compound eyes, which are hairy and can easily become shrouded in pollen. Their front legs function like windshield wipers and are capable of sweeping the pollen away in one motion.
A bee will never fully rid herself of all the pollen granules, of course, since the stuff is actually drawn to her leg hairs by static electricity! This is all part of nature’s master plan: the bees and the flowers are symbiotes. As the bee collects food, she pollinates the plant, which will make seeds, which will result in more flowers to feed the bee.
Back at the hive, the pollen is stuffed into cells, where it is stored and fermented for later consumption. Fermentation is essential to making the pollen’s nutrients accessible for the bees to digest.
A bee foraging on aloe flowers (left); Comb full of red pollen, most likely from aloe (right)
