Meet the colony: queen, workers, drones

A honey bee colony is not a crowd of separate animals. It is one family: almost every bee in the hive is a daughter, a sister or a brother of the others. In a normal colony there are three kinds of adult bee, called castes.

Colony numbers vary between races of bees, regions, seasons and individual colonies. The values here are typical ranges or round numbers chosen for teaching, and they are labelled that way. A colony in midwinter may be only a few thousand bees, nearly all workers.

The queen is the only bee that lays the eggs for the whole colony. At the height of summer a good queen lays on the order of 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a day, which is often described as about her own body weight in eggs, every day. She is longer than a worker and has a long, slim abdomen, but she is not a boss. A queen can live for a few years.

Workers are females, but in a healthy hive their ovaries are undeveloped, so they do not lay eggs. They are the ones who do all the work. In a hive with 40,000 workers, 1,000 drones and 1 queen, the workers make up 40,000 / 41,001, or about 98 percent of the bees.

Drones are males. They are a little bigger and stockier than workers, they have large eyes, and they have no sting. A drone does not clean, feed or forage. His job is to fly out and mate with young queens from other hives, which keeps different colonies from becoming too closely related.

A surprising fact about drones. Queens and workers hatch from fertilised eggs, so they have two sets of chromosomes (one from the queen, one from a drone). Drones hatch from unfertilised eggs, so they have only one set. A drone has a mother but no father.

How does the queen keep the colony together? She gives off a blend of chemical signals called queen pheromones. Workers lick and touch her and carry the scent around the hive, so every bee can tell that a healthy queen is present. If the scent fades, because she is old, ill or lost, the workers start raising a new queen within days.