The honey bee colony is a highly developed community operating much like a super organism. It has many parts, each with its specialized function. This well-organized life in the beehive is considered to be the highest development of the division of labor found in any animal society lower than man's.

QUEEN

There is only one queen in each colony, although an old queen and her successor may coexist for a brief time. The sole purpose of the queen, mother of all the colony, is to lay eggs. At the height of her activity, a young queen may lay as many as 2,000 eggs a day, a total sometimes exceeding her own body weight. A queen may continue at this high rate of production for three or four years, when a new queen succeeds her.

When a queen begins to age, workers construct special queen cells for her replacement. These cells are larger than normal and hang vertically from the brood comb. The queen lays fertilized eggs in these cells, or the workers may deposit them there. When the larvae hatch from these eggs, they are fed continuously a special food called "royal jelly" which is secreted by workers. The quantity and quality of this special food develop in the larvae the special characteristics of a queen (sexually complete). Ordinary food (pollen and honey) causes other female larvae to become sexually undeveloped worker bees. In a way, workers are simply undernourished queens.

The future queen and worker bees hatch from their eggs in about three days and remain in the larval stage nine days. During this period both workers and queens are fed over 10,000 times or an average of 1,300 times a day. The queen, however, receives more and better quality food. At the end of the larval stage, the cells are capped, the larvae spin cocoons and enter the pupal stage. For the well-fed queen, the pupal stage lasts only four days; the underfed future workers take about nine days to develop. The first princess to emerge from her cell makes a piercing noise of challenge to all other contenders in their cells and kills them by a sting.

Between five and ten days after leaving the cell, the virgin queen leaves the hive one afternoon in search of drones on her nuptial flight. Some distance from the hive she will mate, on the wing, with as many as ten drones. The mating act, as is frequently the case in the order Hymenoptera, kills the successful male. The queen then returns to the hive and within two days begins to lay eggs. She stores the drone spermatozoa in her special organ, the spermatheca. The male spermatozoa are then used during the queen's life to fertilize the eggs. The queen can either lay fertilized eggs which become workers or unfertilized eggs which become drones. An old queen is displaced within a week after the new queen begins laying. The occasional presence of an old queen in the hive with her wings chewed off suggests that the workers sometimes take a hand in her retirement.

DRONE

The colony playboys are male drones, hatched from unfertilized eggs, whose functions are to mate with new queens and to generate heat in the hive. Depending on the colony, the number of drones varies from a few hundred to a few thousand. Under natural conditions not more than 10 percent of the colony will consist of drones, which are easily distinguished in the colony, for they are heavier, fatter, and longer than the workers, but not quite as long as the queen. Their eyes are huge, and they have large, strong wings. These last assets help the drone find and catch the young queen as he reaches a top speed of perhaps fifteen miles per hour. But the drone is a virtually helpless guest; he has no stinger for self-protection, and he must be fed by the workers. Drones are produced in the spring after supplies of nectar and pollen become available in the fields. As long as the nectar flow continues at a high level, the workers seem to like having some drones for colony "morale." When the nectar flow stops in the fall, however, the drones' days of leisure come to an end. The workers stop feeding them and bite off their wings. Weakened by hunger, the drones are pushed out of the hive to die in the autumn nights.

WORKER

The female workers make up most of the colony (90-95 percent). They perform all hive tasks except egg laying. In an emergency (no queen), a few workers may even produce male eggs. However, the colony would soon die in this situation.

Workers have sophisticated organs that equip them to perform the many and often difficult tasks of the colony. Their heads are more triangular than the queen's, and the compound eyes are more widely spaced for navigation. Their tongues are enclosed in a tube designed for sucking honey that will be stored in a honey stomach. Their many body hairs accumulate pollen that is stored in pollen baskets on the workers' hind legs. Their smooth and rounded jaws clean the hive and make wax cells. The jaws are also sharp for the colony's defense. Four sets of glands convert carbohydrates into beeswax. Finally, workers have a poison system (formic acid and alkalai) and a one-shot stinger, which is torn from their body when used, causing them to die. In contrast, the queen's needlelike stinger may be used repeatedly.

The first three weeks of the worker's adult life in the hive are spent attending to the queen, acting as a "nurse" to the larvae, cleaning the cells, controlling the temperature and ventilating the hive, plus guarding it against unwanted intruders. Following its apprenticeship, the young worker joins the field force in foraging for food. The worker engages in this activity with such vigor that it is exhausted within three to six weeks and, having expended its usefulness to the colony, is left outside the hive to die.

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