The honey bee life cycle

The honey bee life cycle

If you are a beekeeper, knowing the life cycle of your bee is very important. Honey bees have an unusual and very interesting life cycle.

bee life cycle 

Bees hatch from an egg to start their life. Eggs are made from the queen bee. It can lay up to 1500-2000 eggs per day. When she is ready to lay her eggs, she does so in a cell in the beehive. This cell is intended for this purpose only. The eggs are attached to the beehive with small membranes, similar to an umbilical cord. This will prevent the eggs from falling or injuring themselves.

Once the eggs are ripe, they can hatch. The eggs hatch and new baby larvae appear. During this bee life, they go through 5 different growth stages. They are given a substance called "bee bread," honey, and secretions from nurse bees. The task of the lactating bees is to feed the young larvae, a kind of "babysitter" if you will. Once the larva has completed the five stages, it loses its outer covering, which usually appears on the sixth day of its life. Once the bee sheds its skin, the worker bees enter the cell that the larva is in and seal it to form a cocoon. The larva remains in this cocoon for up to 10 days and emerges from the cocoon as a fully formed bee.

Worker bees can live 130 to 50 days in winter and an average of only 30 to 40 days in summer. That's because they work a lot in the summer. Your main job is to collect the pollen and bring it back to the beehive to produce honey. When they are nurse bees, their main job is to take care of the newly hatched larvae. These are the most common bees in the beehive, with insect hives of up to 300,000 workers. Worker bees are sterile but can lay eggs. When they lay an egg, they produce a bumblebee.

The drone bees have only one goal, namely to penetrate the queen bee. Drone bees have a very short life cycle. As soon as they mate with the queen, they will die. If an unmanned bee fails to mate with the queen, the work of the workers is to starve her. The queen bee can live between 1 1/2 and 2 years. Their only job is to produce offspring. A future queen bee will kill her mother and sisters. She has nothing to do, not even use the toilet, for it is the work of the workers to pamper her, feed her, and even remove her excrement. The life of the colony is directly related to the health of the queen. If she died, the colony would die too. The honey bee life cycle