Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Workers
: this is a complex subject we can only touch on here. A worker's lifespan
will vary according to the time of year. During the summer, the average life span is
15-38 days; during the winter it can be 140 days or more. This depends very much
on the prevailing conditions.
Note
: the number of days until emergence can vary considerably (e.g. for a queen, 14-17
days; for a worker, 16-24 days; and for a drone, 20-28 days). This variability may be
due to environmental factors (especially temperature) and nutrition.
There is generally one queen bee in any colony. The queen is a complete female in that
she can mate and lay eggs, and those, essentially, are her only tasks in life - to mate
and lay eggs. She isn't much bigger than a worker, especially before she has mated, and,
in a very populous hive, can be difficult to find but, with experience, most beekeepers
can find her easily enough. Finding the queen is an important part of beekeeping
management, and tips on queen-finding are given in Chapter 6.
On emergence from her cell as an adult virgin, the queen mates within a few days. With
worker bee encouragement she leaves the hive and flies some distance to what is known
as a drone congregation area (DCA), where she mates on the wing with up to 20-30
drone bees, but usually fewer. Her pheromones attract the waiting drones which, one
after another, fly up to her, grasp her from behind, evert their internal genitals and
literally explode into the queen, ripping themselves apart in the process and dying on
the spot. Then the next drone takes over.
As soon as the queen has stored enough sperm in her sperm sac or spermatheca, she
returns to the hive and starts life as the queen bee of the colony. Her time outside the
hive is dangerous because of predators, such as birds, and also as a result of bad weather,
and so all is usually accomplished in this one flight. She meets drones from many
different colonies, thus helping to maintain genetic diversity and preventing inbreeding.
It is perhaps a point worth making that only the fastest and strongest drones reach her
before she goes home, which may help in propagating only the best of the species.
