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One of our readers wrote to Tyler and told him that he was learning about bees in school. This seemed like a fascinating topic, so we decided to learn a little about bees ourselves and tell you about them. Specifically, we’re going to explore the life of a honey bee, so let’s find out what the buzz is about.

Honey bees are social insects that live together in a colony. Within the colony, there are very strict guidelines as to what each bee does. There are three types of bees, the queen bee, the drone bee and the worker bee, and all have a very important function within the colony. The first kind of bee is the queen bee. She is selected to be the queen at only 2 days old, and in a colony, only one queen exists. To keep any other female bees from becoming possible queens, she will fight any other potential queens to the death. The most important job of the queen is to lay eggs, which takes so much of her effort that she has no time to eat or fly. She is tended to by her worker bees, who feed her after she lays her eggs. The lifespan of a queen bee is about two years.

The second type of bee is the drone bee. Drones are male bees that have no stingers. Their only function in the colony is to mate with the queen bee. There are approximately 200 drone bees in the colony during the spring and summer, but during the winter when food is short, the drones are kicked out of the hive. The longest a drone will live is about 90 days.

The third kind of bee is the worker bee. These are the smallest bees in the colony and are all female. A colony can have anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 worker bees. The worker bee does exactly what her name implies, she works. And she works a lot. Not only do the worker bees feed the queen, but they also collect nectar to make honey, secrete wax from their glands to build the honeycomb and keep the hive cool by fanning their wings. And that’s why you hear a buzzing. Honey bees’ wings stroke 11,400 times per minute which makes that buzzing sound.

Bees have a pretty organized civilization. So, the next time you see one on a flower, you can tell people what kind of bee it is and what it’s doing.