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A worker bee is any female bee that lacks the reproductive capacity of the colony's queen bee and carries out the majority of tasks needed for the functioning of the hive. While worker bees are present in all eusocial bee species, the term is rarely used (outside of scientific literature) for bees other than honey bees , particularly the ...
Developing queen larvae surrounded by royal jelly. Royal jelly is a honey bee secretion that is used in the nutrition of larvae and adult queens. [1] It is secreted from the glands in the hypopharynx of nurse bees, and fed to all larvae in the colony, regardless of sex or caste.
Apart from the queen bee, the remaining female bees are known as the worker bees, as these individuals perform all the tasks necessarily to maintain the hive including tending to the eggs, larvae, and pupae, foraging for food and water, cleaning the beehive and producing honey. These tasks are divided among the female worker bees by a factor of ...
Unlike the worker bees, drones do not sting. Honey bee larvae hatch from eggs in three to four days. They are then fed by worker bees and develop through several stages in hexagonal cells made of beeswax. Cells are capped by worker bees when the larva pupates. Queens and drones are larger than workers, so require larger cells to develop.
The number of cells the bees manage to make varies according to how many worker bees are present in the nest, but usually it is around three cells per female. After they lay the first set of eggs, there is a two-week period of inactivity, and then another set is laid. [ 9 ]
Common honeybee predators include large animals such as skunks and bears, which seek the hive's honey and brood, as well as adult bees. [109] Some birds will also eat bees, (for example, bee-eaters, as do some robber flies, such as Mallophora ruficauda, which is a pest of apiculture in South America due to its habit of eating workers while they ...
Female worker bees develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid in origin, which means that the sperm from a father provides a second set of 16 chromosomes for a total of 32: one set from each parent. Since all the sperm cells produced by a particular drone are genetically identical, full sisters are more closely related than full sisters of ...
If a female worker from a Cape honey bee colony enters an East African lowland honey bee nest, she is not attacked, partly due to her resemblance to the East African lowland honey bee queen. As she is capable of parthenogenetic reproduction, she may begin laying eggs which hatch as "clones" of herself, which will also lay eggs, causing the ...