Worker Bee
Lexikon
Worker bees are the female bees that handle the everyday life of the colony.
Worker bees are the female bees that handle the everyday life of the colony. They emerge from fertilized eggs, just like a queen. From egg to fully developed bee, it usually takes 21 days. How many worker bees live in a colony varies greatly over the course of the year: figures range from a few thousand in winter to around 40,000 individuals in summer.
A widespread misconception is that worker bees have regressed reproductive organs. That is not quite accurate. They do have ovaries, only much less developed than the queen's: a worker has at most about twenty ovarioles per ovary, a queen up to 180. As long as a laying queen is present in the colony, her pheromones suppress the development of these ovaries. If the queen is absent for a longer period, individual workers start laying. Because they were never mated, only drones can result. The colony becomes drone-brooding and, without the beekeeper's intervention, dies out.
The tasks roughly follow the bee's age, because the glands needed for each task mature one after another: first cleaning cells, then feeding larvae, then building wax, standing guard and receiving nectar, and finally foraging flights. This sequence, however, is no rigid schedule. The Celle bee institute explicitly points out that the day figures are only guidelines and that bees react very flexibly whenever something is missing in the colony.
For work at the colony this means two things. First, the sheer mass of bees alone says little, because summer bees live only about five weeks while winter bees live for several months. Second, every nucleus colony needs enough young bees that can still feed and build, not just old flying bees.