Bee caste identification, roles and functions within a colonial beehive.

Honey bees build perennial nests from wax to breed and house large colonies of tens of thousands bees and produce and store a surplus of honey.

Bees are domesticated and provided housing by beekeepers in apiaries for the culture of mono floral and multi floral honey, beeswax, propolis resin, pollen bee bread ambrosia and royal jelly

Honey bees are eusocial insects with clear division of labour organized by complex communication with cognitive and sensory processes through pheromones and in flight dances.

The three different castes of bees carry out individual functions and tasks towards the success of the entity of the hive.

• Queen bee is the only female bee in the hive capable of laying eggs.
  - When mature enough to fly out of the hive, a virgin queen will accomplish one or several mating flights in sunny, warm weather to drone congregation areas in nature or open mating in mating yards where she will mate mid air in flight with drones from other colonies only, to receive and store up to 6 million sperm in her spermatheca from twelve to fifteen male bees which she later uses to selectively fertilize the thousands of eggs she will lay for the remaining two to seven years of her life in the hive.
  - Queens fly further away from the hive than drones, limiting inbreeding. Mating with several drones ensures the queen provides increased genetic diversity within a broader genetic pool, disease resistance, colony fitness for foraging and winter survival and hybrid vigour strength to her brood.
  - Each mating flight lasts about 20 minutes and occur up to 8.3 kilometres away from the hive. Bee mating congregation areas are not found closer than 90 m away from an apiary. Congregation areas with greater distances from apiaries receive more drones.
  - The bee queen lays one egg per cell in the part of the wax honeycomb dedicated to brood and can choose to fertilize some eggs and not others by selectively releasing sperm as the egg passes through her oviduct.
  Unfertilized eggs are haploid and develop into male drone bees while fertilized eggs develop into female worker bees and new queens.
  - Larvae selected to become queen bees are specially fed solely royal jelly by nurse bees while worker and drones are fed royal jelly for only three days then switched to a diet of water diluted honey and bee bread, a mixture of pollen and nectar. The queen only eats royal jelly her whole life in larval and adult bee form.
  - Worker bees also construct exclusive queen cells that are peanut like in shape and texture, larger than normal worker and drone brood cells and vertically oriented instead of horizontally to accomodate the larger developing young queen. The special queen cells start out as partially constructed cell cups that worker bees will further build if the colony’s queen lays an egg in the queen cup when conditions for swarming or supersedure are right. If the beehive colony needs an emergency queen, worker bees will modify cells of brood less than three days old into specialized queen cells that will also protrude vertically from the face of the brood comb.
  - When more than one queen exists within a hive, the queen either kills the other queen or queens or swarming occurs where a single original colony splits into two or more new colonies as a natural means of reproduction and survival. Worker bees and a queen swarm en masse away from the natal hive to build and establish a new nest.
  - Queen bees can sting but rarely do. They have a smooth stinger used mostly to kill other queens in the same hive but the stinger lacks barbs so a queen bee can sting animals with skin several times without dying. Getting stung by a queen bee is more potent than worker bees, beekeepers should be careful when handling queens and have queen odour on their hands.
  
• Worker bees are non reproductive female bees in the hive.
  - Young worker bees are nurse bees, they clean the hive and feed the larvae after the eggs hatch before capping the brood cells in the pupae stage. When their royal jelly producing glands output diminishes, they attend to the queen then begin building honeycomb cells and repairing cells by producing beeswax from honey and progress to other tasks within the colony such as receiver bees to receive foraged material. Wax worker bees process honey and pollen into ambrosia and store them into comb cells with a wax capping. Pollen is mixed with honey to form bee bread for storage because fresh pollen will become rancid. When their stinger is mature worker bees work as guard bees to protect the hive entrance. Later, an older worker bee takes her first orientation flight and finally leaves the beehive to spend the remainder of her life as a forager bee collecting nectar, pollen, plant resin and water and to locate new nest sites as scout bees when the colony has overgrown its nest and is ready to swarm or abscond the whole colony to a new home closer to foraging resources.
  - Worker bees thermoregulate to maintain the hive temperature by warming or cooling as needed and cluster for warmth during winter and to provide crucial heat to travelling swarms. Temperature regulation in the brood chamber is important, in addition to help with honey making. To generate warmth worker bees increase the temperature of their thoracic muscles using isometric contractions then press their muscles again the caps or walls of the brood cells. To cool the hive worker bees collect water or diluted nectar which they deposit around the hive then fan the air with their wings to cause cooling by evaporation.
  - Worker bees typically have a lifespan of 2 to 6 weeks in summer and up to 20 weeks during winter.
  - Worker bees die after stinging as their barbed stinger and venom bulb embeds into the victim and harms the body and internal organs of the bee when detaching into mammals and birds. When bees sting other kinds of animals their stinger are not removed which means the animal can get stung repeatedly. Foraging and scouting worker bees can travel up to 3 km and journey up to 10 times a day with trips lasting an hour.
  
• Drone bees are male bees.
  - Unlike worker bees, drones do not have a stinger so cannot sting, nor do they forage to gather nectar or pollen, they obtain food with the assistance of worker bees who supply them with honey.
  - The only role of drones is to be ready to mate with a receptive queen during a nuptial flight. Multiple trips to a drone congregation area may take place in a day with the drone returning to the hive to refuel with honey after every flight of up to 25 minutes.
  - Drones may help worker bees generate heat by shivering or exhaust heat by moving air with their wings if a severe temperature deviation occurs in the hive or buzz around intruders to disorient them if the nest is disturbed.
  - Drones mate only once and die shortly after as a part of their body is broken after successful mating, with a life expectancy of about 90 days without mating. Drones congregate in numbers as big as 25 000 from as many as 200 colonies, not all the drones are successful even if the queen mates with multiple drones in a broad mix to ensure genetic diversity in her colony.
  - Drone bee larvae take longer to grow in their brood cells than worker bee larvae and deplete energy resources as adults in winter. In late autumn drones are ejected from the hive to conserve the food resources in the hive for the winter and are not bred again by the queen and her workers until late spring.

The bee queen, workers and drones have physical differences that can be easily identified by the trained eye in all the egg, larval, pupal and adult developmental stages.

• The adult queen bee’s abdomen is significantly longer than both the worker bees’ and drones. As a larva and pupa, the young queen hosting cell is the peanut like, largest distinguishable cell outcropping of the honeycomb.

The queen bee can be identified with her long abdomen and prominent thorax. She is accompanied by worker bees on a brood comb with empty cells, capped female worker pupae cells and developing larvae present.

A brood frame with capped female worker bee pupae cells on the left, capped male drone bee cells in the middle and queen cup cells on the right edge. Queen cups host larvae bred to become sexually viable female bees. Nurse bees will complete the queen larvae cell into the peanut like structure when an egg laid into it is almost ready for pupation.

A natural honeycomb with peanut looking queen cells capped for pupa metamorphosis. Empty brood cells, capped worker bee cells, wax sealed honey storage cells and glistening uncapped honey cells are observable.

• Worker bees are the smallest bees in the hive, much smaller than queen bees and drones and present in far bigger numbers than both. The body of a worker bee is specialized for nectar and pollen collection. The pollen baskets on the hind legs of worker bees can clearly be discerned when they are full and appear as yellow bulges.

Smaller worker bees in large numbers tend to the developing brood on a natural honeycomb with capped worker bee cells discernible while a queen bee, with her long abdomen and notable black thorax, lays eggs into empty cells.

Female worker bees can be differentiated by their smaller eyes and bodies from the drone among them.

Forager worker bees returning to the hive with the pollen baskets on their legs filled up.

• Drones are characterized by eyes twice larger than worker and queen bees. The body size of male bees is greater than worker bees but smaller than a queen bee with a stouter abdomen. Drone bees are raised in cells considerably larger than cells used for worker bees.

Drones are recognized among worker bees with their big bulging eyes and bulky bodies. Males bees have wings that are slightly longer than their body unlike most female bees.

Brood cells dedicated to female worker bees and male drone bees can be distinguished on this apiary beehive frame. The flat capped cells are for worker bee pupae and the cells extending out of the comb are for drone pupae.

Queen bee and a drone mating in flight. Notice the big eyes and stocky body of the drone and the slender long body of the queen with a smaller, pointy recognizable head.

The queen bee, female worker bees and male drones all have different life cycles.
Queen bees develop in 16 days from an egg and are fertile from day 23 of life.
Worker bees develop in 18 to 22 days from the egg.
Drones develop in 24 days from their egg and reach fertility at about 38 days from conception.

Queen bee life cycle