The honey bee (Apis mellifera) life in colonies of many thousand folks which stay in a hive (an artificially produced ‘nest’). There are a few types of honey bee: queens, drones and employees.
Queen. There is only just one queen in a hive. She is the only bee that can lay eggs. She is fed by the personnel. She is mated by a person of the drones and shops his sperms in a special sac in her body. This offer of sperms lasts for her life span.
Drones are male bees. Their perform is to fertilise the next queen when she hatches. They do not collect nectar or pollen but are fed by the personnel. There are only a number of hundred drones per hive. In winter they are expelled from the hive.
Staff are woman bees but they are sterile, i.e. they can’t lay eggs. There may possibly be 20,000 to 80,000 employees in a hive. Amongst other responsibilities, the employees assemble the honeycomb working with wax secreted from glands on their abdomens. The combs consist of an array of hexagonal ‘cells’ into which eggs are laid or nectar and pollen stored.
Eggs laid by the queen in some of these cells create into larvae which are fed by the employees until they become pupae. The personnel then set a capping more than the cells until finally the grownup bees are all set to arise.
Workers’ duties. The workers carry out a sequence of responsibilities as they turn out to be more mature. At to start with they cleanse the hive by getting rid of useless larval ‘skins’ and lifeless bees. Afterwards they start off to feed the larvae on nectar and pollen. Soon after 10 to 12 days their wax glands become energetic and they establish the cells of the honeycomb. In about three months, the workers leave the hive and go foraging for nectar and pollen from bouquets. They get these solutions back again to the hive and keep them in the cells.