Honeybee: Five Jobs in a Few Short Weeks
Day one: a tiny bee chews her way out of a wax cell. Follow one honeybee through her whole life as she works as cleaner, nurse, builder, guard and finally forager, and discover royal jelly, the waggle dance, how honey is made, swarming, and how a hive survives the winter.
Day one
Day one. A tiny bee chews her way out of a wax cell. She will live for only a few weeks. And in that short life, she will do almost every job in one of the most organized cities on Earth.
Honeybee
This is the life of a honeybee, from her very first day to her very last flight.
The hive
Her home is a hive of tens of thousands of sisters. They share the work, the food and the danger, and together they behave almost like one giant living body.
The cleaner
Her first job is cleaning. For her first few days, she polishes empty cells, one after another, so the queen can lay new eggs inside them.
The nurse
Then she becomes a nurse. Glands in her head make a rich food, and she feeds the growing larvae, checking on each one again and again, many times a day.
Royal jelly
Some larvae get something special. Fed on royal jelly for their whole life as larvae, a few of them become queens. The rest, fed differently after their first days, become workers like her.
The queen
The queen is the mother of the whole hive. In spring, she can lay up to two thousand eggs in a single day, and she can live for several years.
The drones
Then there are the males, the drones. They have no stinger, and they do not collect food. Their one job is to mate with a young queen. And when autumn comes, the workers push them out of the hive.
The builder
Around her second week, our bee becomes a builder. Glands on the underside of her body make tiny flakes of wax. She chews them and shapes them into the hexagons of the honeycomb, a shape that stores the most honey with the least wax.
Keeping warm, keeping cool
The young need warmth, around thirty-five degrees Celsius. On hot days, bees fan their wings and spread water to cool the hive. On cold days, they shiver their flight muscles to make heat.
Bee glue
Bees also collect sticky resin from trees and turn it into propolis, a natural glue. They use it to seal cracks in the hive, and it helps protect the colony against germs.
The guard
At about three weeks old, she guards the entrance. Every bee that lands is checked by its scent. Strangers are turned away. Her stinger is barbed, and if she stings a mammal, she will die.
The forager
And then, at last, she flies. She becomes a forager, the final job of her life. She can travel several kilometers from home, at around twenty-five kilometers an hour.
Five eyes
She has five eyes: two large compound eyes, and three tiny simple eyes on top of her head. And she sees the world differently from us. Her eyes can see ultraviolet light, and many flowers carry ultraviolet patterns, like landing strips, that guide her straight to the nectar.
The waggle dance
When she finds good flowers, she flies home and dances. On the comb, she runs in a figure of eight, waggling her body. The angle of the waggle shows the direction, measured from the sun. Its length shows the distance. Scientist Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize for cracking this code.
Making honey
She carries nectar home in a special honey stomach. In the hive, bees pass it from mouth to mouth, adding enzymes, and fan it until most of the water is gone. When it is ready, they seal it under wax. That is honey.
Bee bread
Foragers bring home pollen too, packed into tiny baskets on their back legs. Pollen is the hive’s protein. Mixed with nectar, it becomes bee bread, food for the growing young.
A twelfth of a teaspoon
It takes a lot of work. In her whole life, one worker makes only about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. Half a kilo of honey needs nectar from around two million flowers.
Pollinators
And as she flies from flower to flower, she carries pollen with her, helping plants make fruits and seeds. A large share of the food we eat depends on pollinators like her.
The swarm
When a hive grows too crowded, the old queen leaves with a large part of the workers, as a swarm. Scout bees search for a new home and dance for the best sites. Only when enough scouts agree on one place does the swarm take off.
Winter
And in winter, when there are no flowers, the bees huddle together in a tight ball around their queen, shivering to stay warm and living on the honey they stored in summer. These winter bees can live for months.
The last flight
After a few weeks of flying, her wings are worn and ragged. One day, she does not come home. Her life was short, but her work keeps the whole hive alive.
Remember the bee
So the next time you see a bee on a flower, remember: she may be only a few weeks old, and already on the last job of a very busy life.
Prefer to watch? This whole story is told in our 5:30 animated documentary.
Sources
Every fact in this article and video was checked against these sources.
- Texas A&M Extension, Honey Bee Biology
- American Bee Journal, Division of Labor
- Winston, The Biology of the Honey Bee
- WorldAtlas
- Winston 1987
- Hales, Discrete & Computational Geometry 25
- Seeley, Honeybee Democracy
- Simone-Finstrom & Spivak 2010, Apidologie
- Chittka & Raine 2006
- American Bee Journal, von Frisch
- nobelprize.org
- National Honey Board
- FAO / IPBES Pollinators Assessment 2016
- Cornell Chronicle, Seeley
- AskNature
Media credits: footage from Pexels (Pexels License); music from Pixabay ("Documentary" and "Documentary Calm" by leberch, "Cinematic Documentary" by Lexin_Music). Narration: Microsoft Edge neural TTS (en-US-AndrewMultilingualNeural). Cut-paper illustrations drawn for this video.
