This video will show you what a honeybee drone looks like and also show you the difference between Italian Drones and Carniolan Drones.

The honeybee has two sexes, male and female.

Of course we all know about the Queen (the dominant female) who lays eggs and keeps the colony together, and we know that all of the worker bees, nurse bees and guard bees are also immature females and they all have various tasks throughout the colony.
All of these immature females come from fertilized eggs that the queen lays to create worker bees.

But there are also Male bees, called DRONES.

The queen bee can lay a fertilized egg or an unfertilized egg.

If the queen lays an Unfertilized egg, it will be a male and hatch into a Drone, a male that ONLY has the queens genes.

If she lays a fertilized egg, it will be a female that has the queens genes AND the genes of a drone that she mated with. This bee can become another queen if the colony needs a new queen or typically it will become an immature undeveloped female that is known as a worker bee, it all has to do with how much royal jelly the new larva is fed. If the larva is to be a worker bee, the nurse bees feed it royal jelly for 2 1/2 days, then switch its diet to pollen and honey. If it is to become a queen, they feed it royal jelly for all 9 days of its pupa life. They will then cap the cell with a mix of wax and pollen and the pupa will cocoon into a larva until it emerges as a worker or queen.

As a side note, some worker bees can also develop the ability to lay eggs and occasionally do. They lay them in worker bee cells that the queen would typically lay eggs in and yes, they will also hatch, but into undersized, yet functional drones as well… in this case, these drones would pass on the genes of the queen AND the genes of the drone she mated with, thereby giving more variety to the gene pool.

Drones are bigger than the worker bees and have giant bug eyes. They don’t sting and they just come and go where they fly to what is believed to be a LayLine intersection that may be close to the hives where they will hover and circle waiting for a new queen to arrive to mate with. When they get tired and hungry, they return to the colony for rest and feeding.

Drones are a sign of a very healthy colony as the queen wants her DNA to be given to other queens to lay fertilized eggs with her DNA.

When a hive is healthy, they produce Drones to spread the queens DNA but there’s a drawback to this…

Drones do not contribute to any part of the colony except for passing on the queens DNA to other queens that they mate with.

Drones do not forage, they do not protect the colony, they don’t sting, and they don’t make honey or royal jelly or wax or propolis.

They are a drain on the resources of the colony as they must be fed by the nurse bees and cared for by the worker bees.

They come and go from the colony and their only job is to pass on the queens DNA.

If the colony is healthy and bringing in plenty of nectar and pollen, and if the colonies numbers are strong, the queen will lay about one dozen unfertilized eggs that the worker bees will hatch and care for. Drones are large wide bodied bees with large heads mainly very large bug eyes. They look like they’re wearing helmets.

If the colonies resources begin to be depleted or at the onset of fall, the worker bees will stop and refuse to feed the drones causing them to starve to death to lessen the drain on the colony.

 

The Life Cycle of a Honeybee from egg to death.

The Honeybee has 4 stages of growth: Egg, Larva, Pupa and Adult

EGG STAGE (days 1-3): 3 days
The queen lays one egg per cell throughout the brood nest which is located in the center of the colony. If you look at all of the frames together, the brood area looks much like a football in shape with the largest concentration of brood in the exact center of the colony box tapering off toward the ends and usually never in the end frames. The eggs are very small and look like tiny grains of rice at the bottom of the cell. Worker bee eggs are laid in smaller cells while drone and queen eggs are laid in specially constructed larger cells.

LARVA STAGE (days 4-9): 6 days in this stage
3 days after the egg is laid it will hatch into a larva. Nurse bees will feed and care for the larvae as they grow to take up the entire cell.
Larva are a small grub, legless, wingless, blind and dependent on the colony for food, warmth and protection.
Once the larva has grown to its maximum size, it is ready enter the pupa stage. The nurse bees will cover the cell with a cap made of wax mixed with pollen. The pollen mixed into the wax allows oxygen to penetrate the cell for the final development of the bee.

PUPA STAGE (days vary):
For a new Queen: 6 days in the pupa stage (Days 10-15)
For a new Worker:  11 days days in the pupa stage (Days 10-20)
For a new Drone: 14 days in the pupa stage (Days 10-23)
When the larva is capped in its cell, it will spin a cocoon around itself and develop into a pupa (similar to how a butterfly spins a chrysalis). At this stage, the pupa is becoming an adult bee and develops its eyes, legs, wings, stinger and other body parts.

ADULT BEE Adult Emergence
Finally, once the pupa is done going through its metamorphosis and has become an adult honey bee the new adult bee will chew through the cocoon and wax capping of its cell and emerge into the colony.

TOTAL TIME from Egg Laid to Emerging Adult:
For a New Queen = 16 Days
For a Worker Bee = 21 Days
For a Drone = 24 Days

Lifespan:
Worker bee = 6 weeks
Drone = up to 55 days
Queen = up to 7 years

After emerging as an adult honeybee workers adopt different tasks throughout their brief 6 week lifespan such as: nurse bees, guard bees, forager bees, hive maintenance bees, honey makers, repair bees and extruder bees, not exactly in that order but typically what ever the colony is in need of, bees will change roles accordingly. Most newly emerged bees take up the nurse bee role first and then move on to other tasks in a few days as needed. Newly emerged bees don’t have a potent venom so their sting is not very painful.
Forager bees are usually the oldest and usually spend the last 2 weeks of their life making thousands of trips to flowers for pollen and nectar. Being exposed to flowers, pollen, nectar and plant sap, their bodies amplify their venom and they then have the most painful of stings. They wear their wings and their bodies out and usually die from the extremely hard work of foraging.

A forager bee can fly as far as 10 miles from the colony for pollen and nectar but typically likes to stay with 3 miles. Our bees regularly travel 3 miles from the colonies to forage alfalfa and clover. Nevertheless, the massive number of trips to and from the colony takes its toll on every forager typically killing them in the end.

HONEY, A PRECIOUS COMMODITY: A typical worker bee makes about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her entire 6 week lifetime! In other words, it takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make 1 teaspoon of honey.

A QUEEN bee can live for up to 7 years but her egg laying capability declines after about 1-2 years. A healthy queen can lay about 3,000 eggs a day during the peak summer months which is more than her body weight in eggs and since her worker bees only live 6 weeks, she is also laying eggs all winter long, to keep her winter population of bees up. Without enough workers the hive would die out in the winter. As spring approaches, she increases her egg laying to have plenty of workers emerging as the spring flowers begin to blossom. A healthy queen will lay approximately 800,000 eggs in her lifetime. The Queens entire job for the colony is to reproduce. She is an egg laying marvel and never leaves the hive except to mate or to split the hive and start a new colony.  Queens do not forage or even go looking for food, they are constantly fed and cared for by nurse bees sometimes called attendant bees. The queen bee produces a pheromone scent that identifies her and all of her colony bees. Colony boxes can be put right next to each other and the workers can find their own home by the scent that comes from the boxes. A few worker bees are always stationed at the hive entry and are buzzing their wings pushing the scent out the door so that returning workers can smell it and return home.

KILL THE QUEEN: If a queen from one colony goes into another colony, the bees in that other colony will capture and kill her immediately. If worker bees from one colony make an error in judgement and enter a neighboring colony, they are just repelled by the guard bees.

If however a queen is put in a queen cage (see picture below) and put in a neighboring colony and the colony bees can’t get to her to kill her, the nurse bees of that colony will feed her through the screen and tend to her needs.

NEW QUEENS
If a colony’s queen dies or leaves or is otherwise incapable of laying the eggs needed to keep the colony healthy, the worker bees will make 6-12 new queens. Typically the first queen to emerge will kill her other sister queens in their sealed chambers so that only one queen is present. If another sister queen emerges, a fight to the death will ensue between the two suiters.
Sometimes, a colony will just create another queen even with the original queen present, healthy and working. In these cases the existing queen and the new queen (mother and daughter) have been found working together and sharing the egg laying.

DRONES mature at 16 days old and are only good for breeding for about 12 days after that, however the typical lifespan for a drone is up to 55 days unless the colony decides the drones are a drain on the colony resources at which time they will just stop feeding them and they will starve to death.

DO WORKER BEES LAY EGGS?
As a side note, since all worker bees are female some worker bees can also develop the ability to lay eggs and occasionally do. They lay them in worker bee cells that the queen would typically lay eggs in and yes, they will also hatch, but into undersized, yet functional drones as well… in this case, these drones would pass on the genes of the queen AND the genes of the drone she mated with, thereby giving more variety to the gene pool.

Also see my related article: What is a Drone?