Life History of the Honey Bee 
Letitia E. Wright, Jr. 
Every colony of bees has a queen, many thousand workers and 
some drone bees. The queen is the mother, the drones the male 
bees, and the workers, as the name implies, the bees who do all the 
work. 
A colony of bees may live in a hive, a hollow tree or the eaves of a 
house. 
In every colony during the spring and summer you may find some 
drones, the male bees, and they are large and noisy fellows with 
enormous eyes. They do not sting, in fact they have no stings and for 
protection have loud voices and look more deadly than the worker 
bee. Drones are idle, they cannot gather nectar from the flowers, but 
eat the honey that has been stored away by the industrious worker 
bees. Only while the hive is prosperous and honey is coming in, are 
the drones tolerated. At the approach of fall or a sudden cessation of 
the honey flow in the summer, the drones are killed. The worker bees 
drive them from the hives, the sentinels at the doorway forbid their 
entrance, and they die of hunger and weakness. 
Drones have large eyes, and strong wings because, it is the swiftest 
of flight and the keenest of sight who weds the queen bee. 
In a colony of bees there may be many hundred drones, where only- 
one is needed. In this, nature is seemingly very wasteful. 
A good bee-keeper does not allow his hives to raise many drones. 
(How to control the production of drones will be gone into in one of 
the articles on bee-keeping to follow.) 
The worker bees form the great seething, boiling mass that fas- 
cinate and terrify you when you first lift the lid of a hive. 
The workers protect the hive, they provide for the colony, they 
A^entilate during the heat of summer, appearing like tiny electric fans, 
their wings vibrating too quickly to be seen. They are living furnaces, 
when the cold penetrates through their protection in winter. Bees do 
not, strictly speaking, hibernate, but, being warm-blooded animals, 
when the temperation drops, they exercise to bring up the heat, and in 
order to do this, they consume honey, for no furnace, even a live one, 
can produce heat without fuel. 
The worker bees feed the young, clean the hive, make the wax and 
build the comb, gather the pollen in their pollen baskets and the 
nectar in their honey stomachs. They hunt for a new home, and when 
a swarm comes from a hive, those workers who have done scout duty 
lead the swarm to the new home. 
19 
