What Is In A Bee Hive?
Have you ever wondered what goes on inside of a bee hive?
Well, you may be surprised to know that a bee hive is a pretty tight community.
The hive consists of 3 types of Bee:
Workers
Drones
Queen
Worker Bees
All worker bees are female and have different jobs throughout their lives, all be it a short life of 30 days.
The worker starts as an egg laid by the Queen in a brood cell. Three days after being laid the egg hatches into a lave, the lave are white and resemble small curled grubs. These lave start small the quickly grow shedding their skin 5 times over a 5 day period. The Nurse bee’s feed these lave royal jelly and then ween to honey and pollen. Around day 9 of growth the worker bees seal the brood cell with wax, called a cap. This bee is now considered a pupa, over the next 12 days the pupa develops its colour, grows eyes and legs and begins to resemble an adult bee. Around day 21 the pupa is ready to emerge as an adult bee. The pupa begins to eat its way out of the wax cap and emerge as a functional member of the colony.
When a worker hatches from the brood they start their lives as a “Nurse” bee, these bees tend to brood (bee eggs and lave) and ensure that the brood is fed, warm and growing healthy. The Nurse bee’s will also tend to the Queen. These workers then get promoted to mortuary bees, this job involves removing dead bees and lave that did not survive from the hive. The workers then are promoted to foragers and fly from the hive to collect pollen and water. At the final stage of their life they become guards, protecting the hive from foreign bees and pests.
Drone Bees
Drone bees are the Male bee in the hive. The sole purpose of the Drone is to breed with virgin queens away from the hive.
The Drone starts off life the same as a worker bee, apart from the fact that drones hatch from an unfertilized egg and have a larger brood cell to grow in. The Drone lave emerge from the brood cell slightly faster than a worker will and do not have a stinger. Drone bees have a shorter life than a worker and if he is successful in mating with a virgin queen, this will be the end of the line for him as the mating process will cost him his life.
Queen Bees
The Queen bee is arguably the most important member of the hive structure as she is the only bee to lay fertile eggs. The Queen starts life like all other bees, as an egg laid in a brood cell. However, this is no ordinary cell, the queen cell is much larger than other brood cells and protrudes from the brood frame, these cells look more of a cocoon and have an opening at the bottom. The worker bees are the ones to determine when the hive requires a new Queen and will prepare a cell accordingly ready for the current Queen to lay an egg within. The worker bees will then nurture this lave and feed it only royal jelly right through to the pupa stage. This constant source of royal jelly is what promotes this lave to royalty and emerge from the pupa stage as a virgin queen. There can only be one Queen in the hive so once the newly emerged virgin queen has taken her mating flight and mated with Drones, she returns to the hive and supersedes the current Queen.