Division of Labor by Age
Verhalten der Bienen
A worker changes tasks over the course of her life.
A worker changes tasks over the course of her life. In the first days after emerging she cleans cells and removes cocoon remnants and larval feces, so the queen can lay in them again. From the fourth day she tends brood: the hypopharyngeal glands become active on the fourth day and deliver enough brood food from the sixth day onward. Up to about the tenth or twelfth day she remains a nurse bee.
From the eleventh day the wax glands switch on and she becomes a builder bee. Around the eleventh or twelfth day she leaves the brood nest more often, takes in incoming nectar, prepares the honey for storage, and manages the stores. Between the 18th and 21st day, guard duty at the entrance is added, after which she flies as a forager.
This sequence is a framework, not a fixed schedule. Bee institutes explicitly point out that the division of labor is not strict: with a high nectar flow, younger workers become foragers early, and regressed hypopharyngeal glands can reactivate if needed. Only the end is fixed: the last phase in a worker's life is always as a forager. For the apiary this means: a colony compensates for losses in one age group, but only up to a certain degree. Anyone who removes many foragers, for example when forming a nucleus colony, disrupts this structure. A summer bee lives around two months in this system, a winter bee seven to eight.