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.
| Caste | How many (summer) | Sex | Main job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Queen | 1 | female | lays the eggs |
| Workers | roughly 20,000 to 60,000 | female | everything else: cleaning, feeding, building, guarding, foraging |
| Drones | none to a few thousand | male | mate with queens from other colonies |
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.