Honey bee life cycle lay fertilized or unfertilized eggs. Each unfertilized egg contains a unique combination of 50% of the queen's genes and develops into a haploid drone. The fertilized eggs develop into either diploid workers or virgin queens if fed royal jelly. The average lifespan of a queen is three to four years; drones usually die upon mating or are expelled from the hive before the winter; and workers may live for a few weeks in the summer and several months in areas with an extended winter. The weight progression of the worker egg, larva: Honey bee life cycle The honey bee life
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