She doesn't live for herself, but for the colony; and she doesn't hesitate to sacrifice her life in protection of her hive (her sting rips out her innards once her barbed stinger is sunk into the flesh of a threatening critter, including intrusive bee keepers. Think tiny Kamikaze fighter). Worker bees emerge from fertilized eggs (yet they themselves are infertile), and are briefly fed royal jelly to develop them into the Amazons they become.
Recently I had the privilege of donning my own brand new bee suit to assist my seasoned beekeeper husband as we harvested gallons of beautiful, liquid gold, along with comb and wax. I did get stung, and it hurt, swelled, itched, and I whined about it for a few days, while my husband ignored his multiple hand stings and probably whispered, "weenie." I still persisted in helping the trapped live workers in escaping our bee house by brushing them out open windows doors. Bless their dinky hearts.
My main job was using the blower on the box of frames to attempt to remove stubbornly clinging bees before Brad carried them into the honey house. In true rookie fashion, I freaked out when a longer-abdomen bee crawled out of a frame, positive we had removed the queen. Nope, it was a drone. Whew! The queen is the penultimate bee, without her, there wouldn't be any worker bees, thus no honey. She is pampered and protected, but out of necessity, as she lays all the good eggs, in great quantities. She lives about 7 years, but only lays eggs for about 4 of those years (up to like 7,000,000, or an egg a minute), at which time she is usually supplanted by a new, younger, stronger queen (either via the hive making the new queen, or when the bee keeper notices that fertilized eggs are declining in the hive, so he/she buys a new queen and introduces it to the hive, hoping the new queen will kill/kick out the old, rather than vice versa. Gratitude is short-lived in the beekeeping world). Queens don't exactly live lives of leisure either. Their best days are probably their larval days when they receive extra doses of royal jelly, to make them into fertile queens.
The final member of the honey bee hive family is the drone. Drones are the males, and are produced by unfertilized eggs. The drones only have one job: to mate with the queen once in her life during her mating flight. She mates with approximately 10 or 12 males and that gives her the 7 million spermatozoa to last her the rest of her useful life (approximately 4 years). Drones don't sting, gather, protect, or produce. Their only function is to procreate. They hatch from unfertilized eggs, maybe about 200 of them each summer, just in case the queen dies and a new queen needs to be fertilized. They do help keep the hive temperature warm during cold seasons, but other than that, they don't have anything to do. Sex usually kills them, as their sex organs normally rip out after mating, and if they don't mate, the just eat, drink and be happy, until they either die, or in cases of low nectar years, are kicked out of the hive to starve, freeze and die. The life of leisure isn't always pretty. Drones are absolutely necessary, only sporadically so; like once every 4 years, a dozen of them are absolutely critical to the survival and perpetuation of the hive.
Next time: The amazing STUFF the honey bee comes up with!
