Encyclopedia · Honey bees
How a honey bee colony works: the complete guide
A honey bee colony behaves like one giant animal made of tens of thousands of bees. Here is everything inside it: who does what, how a bee grows from an egg, how bees sense the world, talk, keep warm, make honey and start new colonies.
Updated 2026-11-10 · Fact-checked against the sources listed at the end.
The colony: one "superorganism"
The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, lives in colonies of roughly 20,000 to 60,000 bees. No single bee can survive alone for long. Together they work like the organs of one body, which is why scientists call a colony a superorganism. A colony has three kinds of bees, called castes:
| Queen | Worker | Drone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sex | Female | Female | Male |
| How many | Usually 1 | 20,000–60,000 | A few hundred to a few thousand, spring–summer |
| Job | Lays the eggs; her scent holds the colony together | Everything else: nursing, building, guarding, foraging | Mate with queens from other colonies |
| Egg to adult | 16 days | 21 days | 24 days |
| Life span | Often 2–5 years | ~6 weeks in summer; 4–6 months for winter bees | Weeks to a few months |
| Stinger | Smooth, used on rival queens | Barbed | None |
The queen
The queen is the only fully developed female in the colony and its mother. In peak season she can lay up to about 1,500–2,000 eggs a day. A few days after emerging she flies out on mating flights to "drone congregation areas", where she mates in the air with roughly 10–20 drones. She stores their sperm in an organ called the spermatheca and uses it for the rest of her life.
She controls the sex of every egg. Fertilized eggs become females (workers or new queens); unfertilized eggs become males (drones). This system is called haplodiploidy. A queen is not a ruler: the workers decide when to raise a new one, and her main "voice" is the queen mandibular pheromone, a scent that tells the colony she is present and healthy.
Any fertilized egg can become a queen. What makes the difference is food: larvae raised in large, peanut-shaped queen cells are fed royal jelly throughout their growth, while worker larvae get it only for the first few days.
Worker bees and their careers
Workers are sterile females that do every job in the hive. Their tasks change with age, a pattern called age polyethism. The ages below are typical but flexible: if the colony needs foragers, young bees can switch early.
| Age (days) | Job | What it involves |
|---|---|---|
| 1–3 | Cleaner | Polishing cells so the queen can lay in them |
| 3–12 | Nurse | Feeding larvae with secretions from glands in the head |
| 12–18 | Builder & storer | Making wax, building comb, receiving nectar, packing pollen |
| 18–21 | Guard & undertaker | Checking bees at the entrance, removing dead bees |
| 21+ | Forager | Collecting nectar, pollen, water and plant resin until she wears out |
A summer forager lives about six weeks, often dying with frayed wings. Workers raised in late fall are different: these "winter bees" have extra fat bodies and can live for months, keeping the queen alive until spring.
Drones
Drones are the males. They are larger, with huge eyes for spotting queens in flight, and they have no stinger. They don't forage or build comb. A drone's single purpose is to mate with a queen from another colony, and he dies right after mating. In autumn, when food runs short, workers drag the remaining drones out of the hive.
Life cycle: egg, larva, pupa, adult
Honey bees go through complete metamorphosis, like butterflies.
- Egg (3 days): the queen glues a tiny egg, about the size of a grain of rice, to the bottom of a cell.
- Larva (about 6 days): a white grub that eats almost nonstop and grows hundreds of times in weight. Nurses feed it royal jelly, then (for workers and drones) a mix of honey and pollen.
- Pupa: workers seal the cell with a wax cap. Inside, the larva spins a cocoon and its body is rebuilt into an adult. Capped brood is the sign of a healthy, laying queen.
- Adult: the new bee chews through the cap and goes straight to work.
| Stage | Queen | Worker | Drone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Egg | 3 days | 3 days | 3 days |
| Cell capped | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10 |
| Emerges | Day 16 | Day 21 | Day 24 |
Anatomy: how a bee is built
- Three body parts: head, thorax and abdomen, with six legs and four wings, all attached to the thorax.
- Wings that lock together: a row of tiny hooks called hamuli joins the front and back wings into one surface in flight. They beat roughly 200 times a second, which makes the buzz.
- Pollen baskets: on each hind leg is a corbicula, a smooth dip ringed with hairs, where foragers pack pollen into pellets.
- Proboscis: a straw-like tongue for sipping nectar and water.
- Honey stomach: a separate crop for carrying nectar home, before the true stomach.
- Wax glands: four pairs on the underside of a young worker's abdomen produce flakes of wax.
- Barbed stinger: on workers, the barbs catch in thick skin, so a worker that stings a mammal tears the stinger loose and dies. Against other insects she can usually sting and survive.
- Hair everywhere: branched hairs grab pollen, and even the eyes are hairy.
Senses: how bees experience the world
- Five eyes: two large compound eyes made of thousands of lenses, plus three small ocelli on top of the head that sense light and help with steering.
- Color: bees see ultraviolet, blue and green, but not red. Many flowers have UV patterns, invisible to us, that guide bees to the nectar.
- Polarized light: bees read the pattern of polarized light in the sky, so they can find the sun's direction even when it is hidden by clouds.
- Smell and taste: the antennae carry thousands of sensors. Bees can be trained to detect specific odors, and researchers have tested them as scent detectors.
- Vibration: bees "hear" mostly through vibrations in the comb and air.
- Electric fields: studies on bumble bees show they can sense the weak electric charge of flowers, which may tell them if a flower was recently visited.
The waggle dance: how bees share directions
A forager who finds a rich patch of flowers comes home and dances on the comb. In the waggle dance she runs a straight line while shaking her body, loops back, and repeats.
- The angle of the straight run, compared to straight up, matches the angle between the sun and the flowers.
- The length of the waggle run tells the distance: the longer the waggle, the farther the food.
- The energy of the dance reflects how good the food is, and the smell on her body tells others what to look for.
For food close to the hive, bees do a shorter, circling dance. Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch decoded the dance language and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work. Bees also communicate with chemical signals: the alarm pheromone, released when a bee stings, smells like bananas, and the Nasonov scent from a gland near the tip of the abdomen guides lost bees home.
Climate control and winter
Bees keep the brood nest at about 93–95 °F (34–35 °C) all season. To cool it, they fan their wings and spread water that evaporates. To warm it, they shiver their flight muscles without moving their wings. In winter, honey bees don't hibernate: they form a tight ball called the winter cluster, eat stored honey and shiver to keep the center warm, slowly moving across the comb to reach food.
How bees make honey, wax, propolis and royal jelly
- Honey: foragers sip nectar into their honey stomach. Back home, they pass it mouth to mouth to house bees, adding enzymes. Invertase splits sucrose into glucose and fructose, and glucose oxidase makes small amounts of gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. Bees spread the nectar in cells and fan it until the water falls to about 17–18%, then cap each cell with wax. More on honey →
- Beeswax: young workers make wax flakes from glands on their abdomen. Making wax costs a lot of energy: bees eat several pounds of honey to make one pound of wax.
- Propolis: "bee glue" made from plant resins, used to seal cracks and coat the inside of the nest. It has antimicrobial properties that help keep the colony healthy.
- Royal jelly: a protein-rich food made in glands in nurse bees' heads, fed to all young larvae and to queens for life.
- Bee bread: pollen packed into cells with nectar and microbes, which slightly ferments. It is the colony's main protein source.
Swarming: how colonies reproduce
A colony reproduces by splitting. In spring, when the hive gets crowded, workers raise new queens. Before the first one emerges, the old queen leaves with a large share of the workers, often around half or more, in a swarm. The swarm hangs in a cluster on a branch while a few hundred scout bees search for a new home. Scouts dance for the sites they find, and the swarm moves when enough scouts agree on one site. Cornell biologist Thomas Seeley described this group decision in his book Honeybee Democracy.
Swarming bees are full of honey and have no home to defend, so they are usually gentle. If you see a swarm, keep your distance and call a local beekeepers' club. Many will collect swarms for free.
The honey bee species of the world
"Honey bee" means the genus Apis, a small group of roughly 8–12 species, depending on how scientists draw the lines. Only two are widely managed in hives.
| Species | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Apis mellifera, western honey bee | Native to Europe, Africa and the Middle East; now worldwide | The bee of almost all commercial beekeeping |
| Apis cerana, eastern honey bee | Asia | Kept in hives; the original host of the varroa mite |
| Apis dorsata, giant honey bee | South and Southeast Asia | Builds huge single combs on cliffs and trees; honey is hunted |
| Apis florea, dwarf honey bee | Asia and the Middle East | Tiny bees, small single combs on branches |
| Apis laboriosa, Himalayan giant honey bee | Himalayas | The largest honey bee; source of rare "mad honey" hunting traditions |
Within Apis mellifera there are many subspecies and bred lines, which beekeepers often call "races":
- Italian (A. m. ligustica): gentle, productive, golden; builds up fast and can overeat stores in winter.
- Carniolan (A. m. carnica): gentle and thrifty, builds up quickly in spring, tends to swarm.
- Caucasian (A. m. caucasia): very gentle, long tongue, uses a lot of propolis.
- Russian: bred from bees in the Primorsky region that lived alongside varroa; shows some mite resistance.
- Buckfast: a hybrid line developed by Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey, England, in the 20th century.
- Africanized honey bees: hybrids descended from African bees (A. m. scutellata) brought to Brazil in 1956. Some escaped in 1957, spread through the Americas and reached Texas in 1990. They defend their nest much more aggressively and in larger numbers, so their nests should be removed by professionals.
Frequently asked questions
How long do honey bees live?
Summer worker bees live about six weeks. Workers raised in fall can live four to six months through the winter. Queens often live two to five years, and drones live weeks to a few months.
How many bees are in a hive?
A strong honey bee colony has about 20,000 to 60,000 bees: one queen, tens of thousands of female workers and, in spring and summer, a few hundred to a few thousand male drones.
Do all bees die after they sting?
No. Only honey bee workers usually die, and only when they sting animals with thick skin like humans, because the barbed stinger gets stuck. Queens, bumble bees and most other bees can sting more than once.
How is a queen bee made?
Workers choose a young female larva and raise it in a large queen cell, feeding it royal jelly the whole time. After 16 days a new queen emerges.
Do bees sleep?
Yes. Honey bees have rest periods with sleep-like behavior: their antennae droop and they stop responding. Sleep-deprived bees dance less accurately, according to research by Barrett Klein and colleagues.
Sources
- USDA Agricultural Research Service, honey bee biology and Bee Research Laboratory resources
- Penn State Extension, Honey Bee Biology and Beekeeping Basics
- University of Florida IFAS Extension, honey bee biology and Africanized honey bee publications
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973, Karl von Frisch
- Seeley, T. D. (2010), Honeybee Democracy, Princeton University Press
- Klein, B. A. et al. (2010), sleep deprivation and waggle dance precision, PNAS