science

Honey bee life cycle

Honey bee life cycle is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Honey bee life cycle rather than just read about it. In short: The honey bee life cycle, here referring exclusively to the domesticated Western honey bee, depends greatly on their social structure. Honey bee colony life Unlike a bumble bee colony or a paper wasp colony, the life of a honey bee colony is perennial.

Key takeaways

Honey bee life cycle belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Honey bee life cycle to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Honey bee life cycle from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The honey bee life cycle, here referring exclusively to the domesticated Western honey bee, depends greatly on their social structure.

Honey bee colony life Unlike a bumble bee colony or a paper wasp colony, the life of a honey bee colony is perennial. The three types of honey bees in a hive are: queens (egg-producers), workers (non-reproducing females), and drones (males whose main duty is to find and mate with a queen). Unlike the worker bees, drones do not sting. Honey bee larvae hatch from eggs in three to four days. They are then fed by worker bees and develop through several stages in hexagonal cells made of beeswax. Cells are capped by worker bees when the larva pupates. Queens and drones are larger than workers, so require larger cells to develop. A colony may typically consist of tens of thousands of individuals. While some colonies live in hives provided by humans, so-called "wild" colonies (although all honey bees remain wild, even when cultivated and managed by humans) typically prefer a nest site that is clean, dry, protected from the weather, about 20 litres (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 US gal) in volume with a 4–6 cm2 (0.62–0.93 sq in) entrance about 3 m (9.8 ft) above the ground, and preferably facing south or south-east (in the Northern Hemisphere) or north or north-east (in the Southern Hemisphere).

Development

Development from egg to emerging bee varies among queens, workers, and drones. Queens emerge from their cells in 15–16 days, workers in 21 days, and drones in 24 days. Only one queen is usually present in a hive. New virgin queens develop in enlarged cells through differential feeding of royal jelly by workers. When the existing queen ages or dies or the colony becomes very large, a new queen is raised by the worker bees. When the hive is too large, the old queen will take half the colony with her in a swarm. This occurs a few days prior to the new queen emerging. If several queens emerge they will begin piping (a high buzzing noise) signaling their location for the other virgin queens to come fight. Once one has eliminated the others, she will go around the hive chewing the sides of any other queen cells and stinging and killing the pupae. The queen takes one or several nuptial flights to mate with drones from other colonies, which die after mating. After mating, the queen begins laying eggs. A fertile queen is able to lay fertilized or unfertilized eggs. Each unfertilized egg contains a unique combination of 50% of the queen's genes and develops into a (haploid) drone. The fertilized eggs develop into either (diploid) workers or queens (if fed exclusively royal jelly). Every honey bee (Apis mellifera) in a hive exists to perform specific duties determined by their sex and age. Like every member of its colony, the nurse honey bee plays a vital role in the survival of its hive. Nurse bees are charged with the care and feeding of the queen and the next generation. The average lifespan of a queen is three to four years; drones usually die upon mating or are expelled from the hive before winter; and workers may live for a few weeks in the summer and several months in areas with an extended winter.

The weight progression of the worker egg, larva:

See also Bee bole Bee colonies Winter cluster

Sources

Development of honeybees bee-info.com, accessed Oct 2005 Stanley E. Flanders (1960). "Caste in the honey bee". Insectes Sociaux. 7 (1): 9–16. doi:10.1007/BF02225754. S2CID 1733996. H. Rembold (1964). "Die Kastenentstehung bei der Honigbiene, Apis mellifica L". Naturwissenschaften. 51 (3): 49–54. Bibcode:1964NW.....51...49R. doi:10.1007/BF00603442. S2CID 27276793. Temporal Polyethism in BeesArchived 2011-07-23 at the Wayback Machine The Beekeepers Waring, Claire; Waring, Adrian (2015). Bee Manual: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Keeping Bees. Haynes. ISBN 978-0857338099.

External links Life cycle information by the FAO

Illustrations

Honey bee life cycle: Honey bee swarm pitched on a high limb — Honey bee swarm pitched on a high limb

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Honey bee life cycle

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Honey bee life cycle claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Honey bee life cycle before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Honey bee life cycle ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Honey bee life cycle

In research: Honey bee life cycle appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Honey bee life cycle in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Honey bee life cycle is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Beekeeping, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Honey bee life cycle outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Honey bee life cycle in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Honey bee life cycle means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Honey bee life cycle out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Honey bee life cycle in simple terms?

The honey bee life cycle, here referring exclusively to the domesticated Western honey bee, depends greatly on their social structure. Honey bee colony life Unlike a bumble bee colony or a paper wasp colony, the life of a honey bee colony is perennial.

Why does Honey bee life cycle matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Honey bee life cycle?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Honey bee life cycle.