Worker Bee
Lexikon
Workers are the female bees that do the everyday work in the colony.
Workers are the female bees that do the everyday work in the colony. They develop from fertilized eggs, just like a queen. From egg to adult bee usually takes 21 days. The number of workers in a colony varies greatly over the course of the year: figures range from a few thousand in winter to around 40,000 in summer.
A common misconception is that workers have regressed reproductive organs. That is not quite right. They do have ovaries, but these are much less developed than the queen's: a worker has at most about twenty ovarioles per ovary, the queen up to 180. As long as a laying queen is in the colony, her pheromones suppress the development of these ovaries. If the queen is missing for a longer period, individual workers start to lay. Because they have never mated, only drones can develop from their eggs. The colony becomes a drone-laying colony and dies without the beekeeper's intervention.
The tasks roughly follow the bee's age, because the glands needed for them mature one after another: first cleaning cells, then feeding larvae, then building wax, guarding, and taking in nectar, and finally foraging. This sequence is not a rigid timetable, however. The Celle Bee Institute explicitly points out that the day figures are only guidelines and that the bees respond very flexibly when something is missing in the colony.
For work with the colony this means two things. First, the mass of bees alone says little, because summer bees live only about five to six weeks, whereas winter bees live several months. Second, every split needs enough young bees that can still feed and build, not just old foragers.