Honeybees Life Cycle
The honeybee’s unique life cycle
The eggs of the honeybees come from the queen bee of the hive, which lays them in cells that are octagonal in shape. A mucus strand will insure that the eggs remain attached to the cell’s wall. These eggs are laid during the spring season, and the queen of the hive can lay around 1900 eggs each day. The cell will keep the egg for some time, until it will hatch and a larva will emerge from it. The larvae are taken care of by the bees that have the role of nurses. These nurses will give the larvae bee bread (a secretion from glands) and honey, to feed them.
The larva develops in time, going through the five stages and shedding their outer skin after each of the five stages. Six days into the procedure, it will be made into a cocoon by a worker bee. Next, it sits in this form, in its cell, for a period ranging from eight to around ten days. At the end, it emerges from the cocoon as a fully adult bee.
A honey bee’s life span
Different occupations in the hive, have different life spans. Each type of honeybee does something different in the hive, and their life span will depend on their occupation. For example, the queen of the hive will live for around two years, as long as she received enough sperm in the period when she did the nuptial flight in the beginning. A queen bee that is in good form will be able to lay around 2000 eggs per day. An interesting fact is that she will kill both her sisters and her mother, leaving her alone.
Queen bees don’t do anything else besides laying eggs, as there are other bees sitting around her, cleaning waste and feeding her. When the queen bee gets older, she generally leaves the nest, while the other bees in the hive will remain and swarm. This will take place during the spring. Usually, people that know what they’re doing in beekeeping believe that a pheromone is generated by the queen bee, to make sure that the worker bees don’t want to have sex. Before a queen bee has its nuptial flight, it’s considered that it’s a virgin. She will mate with the drone bees during her nuptial flight, and these drone bees will die after the mating period ends.
A worker bee’s life
The life span of a worker bee is around one hundred forty days if it’s winter outside, and if it’s summer the duration is reduced to just forty days. The shorter life span of the worker bee is explained by the fact that they actually work themselves until they die. They have plenty of duties to attend to as worker bees. For example, the nurse bees will need to insure that the larvae are taken care of, while the other worker bees go outside and bring pollen in, so honey can be produced. A number of other workers will work on the honey combs, while others will take care of the queen bee, feeding her and cleaning her waste. The hives are also cleaned by the same worker bees. This type of bee is sterile, as the ones that lay eggs are called drone bees. In a smaller hive you can find around twenty thousand bees, while in the largest ones you will find around two hundred thousand bees. As long as the queen bee lives, the hive survives. If something happens to her, then nobody in the bee hive survives.