Bee Behavior - The Worker Honeybee's Life Cycle

The beekeeper need to have a basic knowledge of the bee behavior. First is the worker honeybee's life cycle, from egg to emergence and from emergence to death. This life cycle can be very short.

The worker honeybees take 21 days to produce an adult worker. In a heavy honey flow, the worker may only live three weeks. A worker begins her life as fertilized egg laid by the queen in the bottom of a wax cell. After three days the egg hatches larva, which is fed by workers, first on a special food called royal jelly and then on a mixture of honey and pollen. If a new queen is needed, only royal jelly is fed and a queen develops instead of a worker. After eight days the workers cap the brood cell. Inside, the larva spins a cocoon around itself and becomes a pupa, which emerges on the 21st day as an adult worker bee. If this larva was chosen to be a queen, the queen will emerge on the 18th day.

Eggs and larvae are recorded on his hive sheet as uncapped brood, while brood in the pupal stage is simply recorded as capped brood. The amount and relative proportions of these two types of brood cells will tell a beekeeper about the health and activity of the queen, and their distribution will tell him whether the workers are keeping up with the queen's need for brood-rearing space.

A worker honeybee is ready to work as soon as she emerges from her brood cell. Her life consists of a series of work assignments:

1. First, she will be assigned housekeeping tasks: cleaning out the brood cells, tending the queen, capping brood and so forth.

2. Next task is food storage: she receives nectar and pollen from foraging workers and stores and processes it. She may also be called on the ventilate the hive by fanning her wings at the entrance.

3. Next, she becomes a construction worker, building a new comb by secreting wax from special glands on her abdomen and applying it to build up the comb.

4. Then she goes on guard duty, becoming one of the workers stationed near the hive entrance to prevent robbing by bees from other hives and to protect it from predators.

5. Her final task is foraging, which she will continue until she dies on the job. This consist of flying away from the hive to collect nectar and pollen.

Typically, a beekeeper will not concern himself with the exact bee behavior that he inspects. For more information on bee behavior, visit www.ModernBeekeeping.com