The life cycle of a honey bee from egg to emerge is very different between workers, drones and the queen, if the eggs are unfertilised it will produce a drone (boy bee) and if the eggs are fertilised it will produce either a worker or queen.
All the eggs will hatch at about day 3, once they hatch they enter the larval stage which takes about 6 days at this point the workers cap the cell, and when the cell is capped the larvae begin to spin a cocoon of silk around themselves for the pupal stage. This is the stage where the wings, muscles, legs etc all begin to form and where they begin to emerge at different times.
A queen bee will take about 16 days from egg to emerge, a worker 21 days and a drone 24 days. So if queens and workers come from the same kind of egg how is a queen made?
The difference between a worker forming and a queen forming is diet, workers will be fed a mix of brood food and worker jelly and the queen will be fed mostly royal jelly and honey (the sugar in the honey causes the hormonal change to the queen). Drones are fed a similar diet to workers just with more honey and pollen, the flying penis has one job and job only, to mate with the queen once that's done he will die. The lads also get kicked out of the hive for winter with the queens not mating the boys are not needed and only take up valuable food source. Typically a worker will live 5/6 weeks during main season (up to 6 months over winter), drones live about 12 weeks and queens will naturally live 4/5 years. This is a continuation of another post detailing eggs and larvae, please find the previous post for more information 🐝🐝
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