Vicki Raitor, age 11, of St. Paul, Minnesota, for her question:
What is the life span of a bee?
Right now, the furry little honeybees are hidden in their hives. The door, the cracks and crevices are sealed securely with special wax and the whole thing is waterproofed and draft proofed against the winter. During a warm spell, a few hardy workers may venture outside on short scouting missions. Some members of the colony will survive through the winter and be alive to welcome the spring. One member of the family has a chance to survive through several summers and winters.
There is an old saying that hard work never killed anybody. Maybe that is true for people, who need to keep busy if they wish to reach a healthy, ripe old age. But let's not tell it to the bees. After a month or so of daily duties, a little worker bee usually dies from hard work. During the flowery summer season, when the busy hive is at its busiest, the life expectancy of the average worker is about six weeks.
During this season, the queen mother may lay as many as 2,000 eggs every day Sundays and weekdays. After three days, wormy little larvae hatch from the eggs and the nursemaid workers begin to feed and tend them. After five hungry days, the larvae become pupae and the workers seal them in their waxy cells. There they spend about three weeks metamorphosizing themselves into adult bees. When they emerge, after a short rest and some help from older bees, the new brood is ready to take up active duties in the hive.
As the assembly line proceeds, about 2,000 new workers may be added to the hive every day. At the peak of the summer season, the hive may be home to 50,000 adult workers, a number of male drones, an assembler line of thousands of developing youngsters plus the queen mother. During this period of frenzied activity, hundreds of worn out workers are replaced every day.
As summer draws to an end, life in the hive becomes quieter. The queen lays few eggs and these broods mature in late summer and early fall. Outdoors, the flowers are fading and the weather grows cooler. There is work to be done, but less of it and the later broods do not work themselves to death in a few weeks. At about this time, the drones are permitted to starve to death or are driven from the hive. Their brief lives end with the summer.
When finally winter arrives, the queen is left with a few thousand workers. Inside the hive, the colony huddles together in a furry brown ball and honey is rationed to last until spring. Perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 workers will survive long enough to help the queen mother to start a new colony in the spring.
The queen honeybee has a life expectancy of about five years. Each summer she lays about 200,000 eggs, most of which become adult workers who survive only a month or so. During her entire lifetime, a queen bee may produce a million eggs and outlive almost all of them.
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