From egg to bee

Every bee passes through four stages: egg, larva, pupa, adult. This is called complete metamorphosis, the same plan that butterflies and beetles use. The full story of how a body is rebuilt inside the pupa is told in Ecosystem Island, in the Metamorphosis world. Here we only follow the bee's schedule and what it means for the colony.

The stages of a worker, counted from the day the egg is laid:

3 + 6 + 12 = 21 days. A worker that starts today as an egg walks out of her cell three weeks from now.

The three castes have three different schedules.

Typical values; temperature and race change them by a day or so. The order is the one to remember: queen 16, worker 21, drone 24. The queen is the quickest, so the first queen to hatch usually gets to the other queen cells before they open. Drones take longest, which is one reason a colony has to plan for them early in spring.

What makes a queen? Not her genes. A fertilised egg can become either a worker or a queen. The difference is food.

All young larvae are fed a rich glandular food called royal jelly. Worker larvae get royal jelly for only the first few days and then a plainer mix of honey and pollen. A larva that will become a queen is fed royal jelly throughout its larval life, in a large, special queen cell that hangs down from the comb. The extra food switches different genes on and off, so the same set of genes builds two very different bees: a long-lived egg layer or a worker.