Life Cycle Of Honey Bees .

Three Things Successful Beekeepers Know :

1. The unique life cycle of the honey bee :

The queen bee lays eggs in the octagonal shaped cells and the eggs get attached to the wall of the cell with a strand of mucus.


During spring when the eggs are being laid, the queen bee can lay up to 1900 eggs in a day. 


The egg remains in the cell until it hatches and there emerges a larva.


There are nurse bees that have to care for the larvae and feed the larvae with honey and secretions from the glands which are referred to as bee bread.

There are five stages to the development of a larva, and the larva sheds the outer skin after each of these stages. On the sixth day of this procedure the larva is cocooned by one of the worker bees in its cell where it stays for the next eight to ten days and then emerges as a fully formed bee from its cocoon.

2. The life span of a honey bee :

The life span of the honey bees depends on the purpose that they are in the hive for .


Different jobs have different honeybees doing it and their life spans also differ accordingly. 


The queen bee has a life span of two years but this is only if she has been inseminated with a sufficient amount of sperm while she was on her nuptial flight.

The queen bee if she is in a good condition can lay up to 2000 eggs in a day and is also responsible for killing her mother and sisters too. 


The queen bee has nothing to do as there are enough bees in her entourage to feed her and to clean the waste matter too.
 
An older queen bee will leave the nest while the rest of the bees from the hive are going to swarm. This usually happens during spring time. 


Those who are proficient in bee keeping, think that the queen bee generates some sort of pheromone that avoids the worker bees from the hives in becoming interested in sex.
 
The virgin queen bee is one who has not had her nuptial flight. 


The drone bees are the ones that survive only until they have impregnated the queen bee during her nuptial flight. The drone bee dies after mating with the queen bee.

3. Life of the worker bee :

The worker bee lives for one hundred and forty days only during the winter, and during summer it is only forty days. 


They have a short life span because they literally work themselves to death. 


There are many different duties that the worker bees have to perform.
 
The nurse bees take care of the larvae while others have to go out and collect pollen to make honey. 


Other workers have to be capping the honey combs while some have to attend on the queen bee. 


These worker bees also have to starve the drone bees to death and clean the hives. 


All worker bees are always sterile and in case they lay an egg are drone bees.
 
Each hive has between twenty thousand to two hundred thousand bees in a one hive. 


The bees only survive if their queen life, if anything happens to the queen bee then the whole hive dies.

Magdy Elhalawany