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
Western honey bee at best partial. Oldroyd observes that the lack of full domestication is somewhat surprising, given that people have kept bees for at least 7000 years. Instead, bee-keepers have found ways to manage bees using hives, while the bees remain "largely unchanged from their wild cousins". Leslie Bailey and B. V. Ball, in their book "Honey Bee Pathology", call honey bees "feral insects", in contrast to the silkworm ("Bombyx mori") which they call "the only insect that has been domesticated", and refer to the "popular belief among many biologists as well as beekeepers that bees are domesticated". They argue that honey