Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The Workers
During the active season, a typical honey bee colony contains a single female queen, a
few hundred drones, and thousands of female workers.
Workers raise the young, build the house, take care of the queen, guard the inhabit-
ants, remove the dead, provide metabolic heat when it's cold and air-conditioning when
it's hot, gather the food, and accumulate the reserves needed to survive the inactive sea-
son. When all goes well, workers also provide a surplus of honey for the beekeeper to
harvest.
Queens and drones are fairly task-specific for their entire lives. What makes workers
so interesting, and so complicated, is that their tasks change as they age, yet they remain
relatively flexible and can switch between tasks when needed.
A worker starts as a fertilized egg, with half of her genetic traits taken from her moth-
er, the queen, and the other half from one of the many drones with which her mother
mated. She emerges from the egg as a larva, and for the first three days, she is fed a diet
identical to that of a queen larva. After that, her rations are cut (see
progressive pro-
visioning
on page 51). As a result, her reproductive and some glandular organs do not
fully develop. She is not as large as a queen, is incapable of producing queen substance,
and is unable to mate. After three days as an egg, six days as a larva, and twelve days
pupating, she finally emerges as a fully formed female adult worker honey bee.
The worker bee that appears in the top center of this picture has her head in a cell, feeding
the larva inside. Note the two bees in the bottom center of the photo. They are trans-
ferring nectar from a forager to a food-storing bee. This is part of the nectar-ripening
process, which occurs in the broodnest on what is often referred to as the dance floor.
