What Is the Life Span of a Honey Bee?

Honeybees have been fascinating humans since the discovery of honey as an edible substance. Honey is a thick liquid produced by certain kinds of bees when they repeatedly regurgitate flower nectar. Honeybees produce honey so they will have food for the winter, when flower nectar isn't available. Most species of honeybees live in structured nests called hives. Inside the hive, each bee belongs to one of three specialized groups in the hive: queens, drones and workers. Depending on which group they belong to, honeybees have varying life spans.

  1. Description

    • Honeybees are brightly striped in yellow and black to warn potential predators they are dangerous. Female honeybees have a stinger that they use to defend themselves when attacked. Male honeybees on the other hand, are stinger-less. Like many other insects, honeybees have compound eyes made up of several smaller simple eyes, so images are delivered to their brains in a sort of multiple compound image very different from the way humans see things. While there are four species of honeybee in the world, the little honeybee, the eastern honeybee, the giant honeybee and the western honeybee, the western honeybee is the most widely used to produce honey.

    Habitat

    • Social insects in the wild, honeybees build complicated housing called hives that can be inhabited by more than 20,000 individual bees during summer months. Domesticated honeybees may live in hives with more than 80,000 individuals. The central feature of the hive is the honeycomb, a structure made up of flat six-sided cells made of beeswax. The honeycomb has two sides with cells on both sides. The cells are perfectly uniform in shape and spacing. Different combs serve different purposes. For example, the brood comb is where the queen lays her eggs.

    The Queen

    • Queens are larger than drones or workers and are solely responsible for reproduction in their hives. Each hive has only one queen. Unlike workers and drones, queens have a curved, barb-less stinger that allows them to sting an attacker many times without dying. During their life span of two to eight years, queens lay over 1,500 eggs per day. During this time the queen will make several mating flights and mate with 10 or more males. If the queen lays less eggs or weaken in any way, the workers will raise more queen larvae by feeding larvae food with a higher sugar content. If a new queen emerges, the old queen must leave and find a new hive or die. If more than one new queen emerges from the brood comb, one must leave or they must battle until only one queen survives.

    Workers

    • All worker bees are all sterile females. As their name implies, worker bees do all of the work required to keep the hive operating effectively. Worker bees make up about 85 percent of the population of the hive. In their short life span of around 30 days, worker bees have three life stages. Worker bees ranging in age from one to 12 days old clean cells, nurse the young and tend the queen. Those with 12 to 20 days of life build, store food and ventilate the hive. The oldest workers, at 20 to 30-plus days work in the fields, gathering nectar, pollen, water and some stick plant resins used for building in the hives. Because they have a barbed stinger that is left behind in the flesh of their attackers, worker bees can only sting an attacker once, and will die shortly afterward.

    Drones

    • All drones are stinger-less males. Their main purpose is to mate with a new queen when one is produced. Their eyes are larger than other honeybees in the hive to help them spot the queen during her mating flights. At most a few hundred drones are present at any given moment in the hive. While drones can live up to eight weeks, at the end of the season, or any time when food is scarce, drones are driven out of the hive to die.