Castes Of Honey Bees

The Queen

The queen bee is the only female in the colony capable of reproduction. She looks similar to the workers, but her abdomen is larger. Queens take 16 days to grow from an egg into an adult. Within 10 days of emerging as an adult, the queen will go on a mating flight where she will mate with up to 14 drones. She can then store the sperm from those drones and use it to fertilize her eggs for the rest of her life, which is on average 3 years. The queen is the mother of all of the bees in the hive. She can lay up to 2000 eggs a day! Some worker bees, called attendants, take care of the queen. They will feed her, clean her and tell the rest of the colony how the queen is doing using pheromones.