Honey Bee Life Cycle

All prospective bee keepers who take up honey bee keeping as hobby or as a profession need to essentially understand the honey bee life cycle. The life of the honey bee begins with the queen bee laying an egg in one of the cells in the hive. These cells are constructed only for the purpose of laying eggs and the queen will move from one cell to another laying eggs. The eggs once laid are attached to the hive cell via a mucus strand. The next stage in the life cycle of a honey bee begins once the egg hatches and the larvae emerge. There are certain nurse bees in the colony in the hive that are allocated to take care of these young larvae who are fed bee bread which is a mixture of gland secretions and honey. These larvae will then go through five distinct stages of growth and as each stage is completed the larvae will shed its outer layer of skin. When this larva is six days old, a worker bee will cap the larvae in its cell thereby cocooning it.

Finally the larvae will emerge from its cell after almost 10 days as a fully formed young bee. The average life span of the honey usually depends on what function or purpose the bee is responsible for in the hive. The queen bee can live for almost two years and her primary task is to lay as many eggs as possible and to kill her mothers and sisters. The queen bee always has a whole bunch of worker bees that feed her form time to time and also clean her waste. A queen bee that has not made her nuptial flight is known as a virgin bee. There are also drone bees in the hive colony whose primary purpose is to impregnate the queen bee in the midst of her nuptial flight. After mating with the queen bee, the drone immediately dies. Worker bees are always sterile and of this worker bee does lay an egg then this will become a drone bee. The worker bee is responsible for a variety of tasks in the hive such as caring fro the young larvae, capping off the cells, gathering pollen, taking care of the queen bee, protecting the hive etc. The survival of the hive depends primarily on the queen bee being healthy and laying eggs.