Honey bee life cycle Honey bee life cycle The honey bee life cycle, here referring exclusively to the domesticated Western honey bee, depends greatly on their social structure. Unlike a bumble bee colony or a paper wasp colony, the life of a honey bee colony is perennial. The three types of honey bees in a hive are: queens (egg-producers), workers (non-reproducing females), and drones (males whose main duty is to find and mate with a queen). Honey bees hatch from eggs in three to four days. They are then fed by worker bees and develop through several stages in the cells. Cells are capped
Round dance (honey bee) Round dance (honey bee) Round dance is a term used to describe the communicative behaviour of a foraging honey bee ("Apis mellifera"), in which she flies over the comb in close circles, alternating right and then left. The round dance indicates that the forager has located a profitable food source close to the hive. When the food source is relatively far away (over 50 meters), the round dance transitions into the waggle dance. By performing the round dance, the forager communicates information pertaining to the food source's distance and direction from the hive to the follower bees. Elements of the