If you’re interested in becoming a beekeeper, it’s a good idea to get acquainted with the basics of the amazing insects you’ll be presiding over. In this article is a very brief overview of honeybees and the biological aspects of the hive.

There are several basic types of bees in each species: the queen, worker bees, and drones. Worker bees make up over 80% of the bees in a hive. They are all females, although the vast majority of the time they do not lay eggs.

As an aside, there are some occasions when workers do lay eggs, usually when the queen is dead and there are no other young queens to take her place. When workers lay eggs, they are unfertilized, and only males – also known as drones – can develop from this process. There are extremely rare instances where workers have laid eggs that developed into females, but the situation (called thelytoky) has only been scientifically documented a limited number of times for bees. In general, a hive with egg-laying worker bees cannot survive.

The queen is a larger version of the worker bees, although she has the ability to lay eggs. She very rarely leaves the hive except for mating flights and swarming, which is when half or more of a hive will leave an overcrowded colony in order to establish a new hive.

Drones are larger than worker bees, but not as large as the queen bee. They are males, and their only real purpose in the hive is to fertilize queen’s eggs during mating flights. Other than that, the drones are largely drags on the hive’s resources and ability to survive. During periods when food is scarce, the worker bees often push drones out of the hive and refuse them reentry. If they do succeed in getting back in, they are kicked out once more. Because food shortages tend to occur during cold weather, the drones die of exposure to the elements. A few lucky males are kept on hand to mate with any newly hatched queens that might emerge in early spring.

Workers are responsible for gathering nectar and pollen, tending to bees in the larval state, and protection of the hive, among other duties. In fact, work is divided up into three main categories: foraging, building, and nursing brood.

Brood is the term for any bee younger than an adult, from the time the egg is laid to just before a new adult hatches. Newly hatched bees immediately start tending to the brood as soon as they hatch from the egg, checking on them continuously and feeding them. (You may have heard of ‘royal jelly’ in health stores; royal jelly is a mixture fed to all larvae for three days. After that, the brood are fed ‘worker jelly,’ which is a less potent form of the same mixture – unless the brood is a baby queen, in which case she is fed royal jelly until she emerges.)

Eventually bees move on from caring for the young to building comb, the wax structures in the hive responsible for storing brood, honey, and beebread (a fermented pollen substance that is the source of the bees’ protein). They also stand guard to the hive, expelling unwanted drones when resources wane and driving off intruders (including bees from other hives) through every season.

Eventually, about day 20 after hatching, the bees begin leaving the hive on a regular basis and foraging for nectar and pollen, which they bring back to the hive, where it is processed and stored as honey or beebread.

Howard Peterson has been interested in beekeeping for years. To read more, check out his website’s free articles in the link below and, if you want, you can sign up for a free beekeeping guide delivered by email.