Everyone knows honeybees work hard, buzzing from flower to flower to create everyone’s favorite golden treat: honey. But did you know that bees also have a complex hierarchy that allows them to accomplish so much?
A honeybee hive is more than just a home for bees and honey; it’s a thriving system that’s designed for efficiency and productivity. Every bee has a role to play, and only by working together can they maintain the success of the colony. Read on to learn everything beekeepers should know about honeybee colony structures.
The Queen
At the top of a beehive’s hierarchy is the queen. There’s only one queen bee per hive, and everything the colony does revolves around her and her work. The queen is the only bee in the hive who can successfully lay eggs, making her responsible for the future of the colony.
Luckily, she’s an expert at her job. Queen bees lay their eggs methodically, making sure to only lay one egg per cell, only lay in clean cells, and match fertilized eggs to worker-sized cells and unfertilized eggs to drone-sized cells. This care is what allows the queen to continuously lay a new generation of healthy, productive bees for the hive’s continued success.
The queen also acts as assurance and inspiration for the hive. Queen bees have a unique pheromone they release. As long as the rest of the colony can smell the queen, they remain productive. This scent also doubles as an early indicator of a queenless hive. When worker bees can no longer smell their queen, they know they need to start preparing for a new queen before the colony fails.
The Brood
A healthy brood is crucial for the hive’s continuous success. The brood consists of three groups: eggs, larvae, and pupae. The queen lays the eggs, then worker bees tend to them as they develop into the next generation of bees.
Eggs
In a healthy colony, the queen bee lays all the eggs. This is because only she is capable of laying fertilized eggs, which grow up to be female worker bees. Unfertilized eggs develop into male drone bees, which make up far less of the hive’s population.
Monitoring a hive’s egg-laying pattern is a good way to check on the health of the colony. A healthy queen knows to lay one egg per cell. She also lays up to 2,000 eggs per day during a hive’s population boom in the spring. If a hive has fewer eggs or an irregular egg-laying pattern, it could be a sign of disease, an unhealthy or aging queen, or other potential hive problems.
Larvae
After three days, the eggs hatch as larvae. These white grubs remain in their cells while worker bees feed them. Most eggs—including those that will develop into worker bees and drones—eat a mixture of honey and pollen known as bee bread.
However, if a hive needs a new queen, worker bees will raise a selection of fertilized eggs on a special honey mixture called royal jelly. The royal jelly helps these potential future queens grow larger and develop the reproductive system necessary to fertilize eggs. In time, one of these queen contenders will hatch, kill the other potential queens, and take over as the hive’s queen bee.
Pupae
At the end of the larval stage, the larvae spin their cocoons in their cells. The worker bees then cap each brood cell, signaling the start of the pupae stage. During this time, the pupae develop into adult bees. After a week or two, the fully mature bees emerge from their cells and take on their roles in the colony as workers or drones.
Worker Bees
Most of a colony’s population consists of worker bees. This group includes all female bees except for the queen. They’re responsible for almost all the tasks that keep the hive running, including foraging, making honey, caring for the queen and the brood, and more. A worker bee’s job depends on how old she is, which means she cycles through different responsibilities throughout her life.
Young workers are hive bees. Their job is to protect the hive, keep it clean, build cells for brood and honey, tend to the queen, feed the brood, and make honey. Later in life, these workers will become forager bees and take on the responsibility of leaving the hive to collect pollen and nectar.
Laying Workers
Though worker bees are female, they’re not supposed to lay eggs. You’ll recall that only the queen can lay fertilized eggs, which means laying workers can only produce unfertilized eggs. These unfertilized eggs develop into drones, which do not actually contribute to the colony.
Laying workers only occur when a colony loses a queen and can’t manage to replace her. Out of desperation to maintain the hive’s population, workers will begin laying eggs. Since they can’t lay female eggs, though, the colony gradually loses its worker bee population. This means no workers are left to maintain the hive, protect from threats, forage for food, or make honey.
If you spot laying workers in your hive, you need to act fast to introduce a new queen and correct the hive’s population.
Drones
Drones, or male bees, make up the minority of the hive’s population. They’re slightly larger than female bees but lack many body parts, including a stinger or pollen baskets. Due to their anatomy, they cannot work to defend the hive, forage for food, or otherwise provide for the colony.
Instead, drones exist to mate with another hive’s queen on her mating flight. During mating season in late spring and early summer, drones will gather to mate with a honeybee queen. The young queen will leave her hive to head to one of these congregation areas, where she will mate with several of the thousands of drones who have gathered there. The drones who successfully mated with the queen die soon after. Meanwhile, the queen returns to her hive, having stored enough sperm to fertilize her eggs for the rest of her lifetime.
The drones play an important role in maintaining hive populations and diversity across larger honeybee populations. However, they do not work for their hives, which makes them a drain on the hive’s resources. Later in the season, as the colony prepares for winter, worker bees will push remaining drones out of the hive so they can preserve resources for the queen and the worker bees.
Enhance Your Beekeeping Journey With Dadant
Understanding the structure of a honeybee colony and how each part of the hive works together is key to supporting your bees and maintaining happy, healthy colonies. If you want to learn more about honeybees or start your beekeeping journey, visit Dadant and Sons today. We sell beekeeping protective clothing and other essential supplies to help you maintain healthy, thriving hives and find success with your apiary.