Adult workers progress chronologically through a range of occupations concerned with the daily maintenance of the hive: first cleaning brood cells and warming the brood; then nursing larvae and attending to the queen; next producing wax and building and repairing the comb; and lastly guarding and defending the colony, and regulating temperature.
Finally, after about three weeks of service in the hive, the workers will leave to forage for nectar and pollen, along with water and plant resins, travelling up to three kilometres in search of these valuable resources.
Worker bees reared in spring and summer, when the colony is most productive, toil tirelessly and may live for five to seven weeks. During winter, the colony enters a phase of inactivity; there is no brood to tend and the bees will bunker down to keep the hive warm until spring, when they must emerge to resume their labours. Workers raised in autumn may live for up to four to six months. Male bees, or drones, are almost entirely focussed upon reproduction, although they may assist the workers in regulating temperature within the hive.
Most honey bees will only live a short time after leaving the hive to forage for the first time. What affects pollinator health? Plant reproduction and the role of honey bees.
The life of the honey bee. The Hive Honey bees have an average lifespan of around two months. The viability of these drones does ie via drone semen viability test vary greatly over the year. Work at the lab suggest drones will drift a lot between hives in a given apiary and one has to wonder if this is not one transmission vector for varroa. I would guess anyone that does II work has to know a lot about drones since this is an essential input for their work.
Good point. I should have mentioned I was referring to drones in climates where honey bees cluster for winter. Year round colonies are totally different. That is great info regarding drones. Lots of new and well sourced information which was perfectly explained. What you noted above makes a lot of sense to me now regarding the drones that I saw lounging on the front porch of their hive yesterday.
This is my most robust hive with a huge population! I was back out in the bee yard again today where I was putting together another 5 double deep hives including frames, inner cover, telescoping top, and screened bottom boards. During my breaks I would go and sit by my hives and check out their activity.
There is something relaxing about sitting by the hives and watching them go in and out of the hive entrance. Anyhow, it was warm again today 43 degrees in Santa Fe, New Mexico and this particular hive acted like it was a summer day with all the bee activity.
The foragers and drones were out in force again and the guard bees were letting the drones go back in and out of the hive through mouse guard at will. There were even foragers bringing in loads of pollen as well. I think I will raise some queens from this particular hive, they seem to be extremely acclimated to the cold and this was my biggest honey producing colony.
My other 10 hives were not so active and were clustered with very little activity. Here in the tropics Guam — Western Pacific, 13N Latitude , the few times I see drones evicted is after a colony swarms, or goes queen-less for some reason. Otherwise, they live out their full and happy lives, chasing girls, and sitting on the porch year-round.
You, through your references, answered a couple of questions I had in mind. Queen bees develop faster thanks to their rich diet.
The honey bee queen is also the largest of the bees in a colony, measuring around 2 cm — about twice as long as a worker bee. Drones are slightly bigger than workers, but never as big as queens. A bee colony, an extremely organized, sophisticated society, is made up of three castes categories : A single fertile queen bee, hundreds of male drone bees and thousands of sterile female worker bees.
A bee's caste, as well as the time of year in which it was born, affects its lifespan. Summer workers have the shortest honey bee lifespan, while the queen bee outlives both other castes. Adult drones have no useful purpose within the bee hive. They don't provide food, feed the young or produce wax. In fact, they waste the colony's resources and only serve one purpose: To mate with the queen bee. Drone bees first leave the hive six days after emerging from the pupal cell, flying to areas known for drone congregation and going back to the hive only when they have failed to mate.
Successful maters die minutes or hours after mating with the queen, and the rest of the drone bees survive only as long as the worker bees allow them to.
If there is a shortage of food, the worker bees kill or kick out the drones. Drone bees rarely survive the winter, as the worker bees want to protect their limited resources. When a drone bee is ejected from the hive, he soon dies from cold or starvation.
The average life span of a drone bee is eight weeks. Worker bees also gather water to use to cool the inside of the nest on hot days, and use water to dilute the honey before feeding it to the larvae. It is worker bees who are responsible for pollination: When they land on plants or flowers, they collect pollen dust all over their bodies, and then use their specially adapted legs to discard the pollen, leaving it on other plants.
During summer, worker bees only live for five to six weeks, purely because their heavy workload often gets the better of them.
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