The types of bees

Bees are divided into three castes: the Queen, the workers, and the males.

The Queen:

The queen is the mother of all bees in the hive. It lays 5 to 6 eggs each minute, from September to February, during the 5 years of its life. It is the only fertile female in the
hive. A queen is born in a worker’s egg but she eats royal jelly all her life. That’s why it is the tallest, biggest, and most resistant of all bees. We can recognize it with its
long abdomen, and the abundance of bee workers around it which protect and feed it.

The workers:

The workers are the most numerous of the bees. They do everything in the hive. They clean the alveolus, the protect the hive,, they feed the bee population… 
A bee’s larva grows to its adult stage for 21 days, and a worker lives from 35 to 45 days. The function of a worker changes when it grows. The workers have a
specific language. Indeed, they dance to localize flowers to pollinate. The speed of the dance indicates the distance, and the form of the dance indicates the
direction of the flower clump.

AGE

TASK

From 1 to 3 days

Clean the hive

From 3 to 9 days

Feed all inhabitants of the hive

From 9 to 12

Transform the pollen into honey

From 12 to 18 days

Repair and Build alveolus

From 7 to 21 days

Aerate the hive

From 15 to 25 days

Keep the hive’s entrance and protect it from dangers like bees from another hive

From 22 days to Death

Forage the flowers

The males:

The males are those which make the queen fertile. They don’t do anything else (except transform the pollen into honey, but the entire hive does it), and they are hard to
feed because they are bigger than the workers. At winter, they are the first to die, because they are big consumers of food and they become useless because they don’t
work. Also, they are the only bees which don’t have stings! That’s why some beekeepers put them in their mouth to impress the tourists.