This difference accounts for the great variation in anatomy and function between adult workers and queens.

Future workers receive royal jelly only during the first two days, compared to future queens, who are fed royal jelly throughout their larval life. Worker bees are raised in the multi-purpose, horizontally arranged cells of the comb.

These cells are filled with royal jelly to keep the larvae from falling and to feed them. The queen lays the eggs that will develop into more queens in specially constructed downward-pointing, peanut-shaped cells, in which the egg adheres to the ceiling. A fertilized egg develops into a female honeybee, either worker or queen, and an unfertilized egg becomes a male honeybee, or drone. When an egg passes from her ovary to her oviduct, the queen determines whether the egg is fertilized with sperm from the spermatheca. Hardworking honeybees rapidly transition through their life cycle, with only 21 days from egg to adulthood. The queen controls the sex of her offspring. Sting and nasanov glands for scent develop Highly developed to produce brood food and royal jelly The activities are closely linked to the development of the bee’s glands and hence a bee’s level of maturity. This table shows how labour is divided by workers according to the bees developmental stage. During the first stage of its development, the offspring form a digestive system, a nervous system and an outer covering (the exoskeleton). The table shows the number of days spent as an egg, a larva and as a pupa plus the number of days taken to reach full maturity for all 3 classes of honey bee. The life cycle of honey bees begins when an egg hatches.

The number of days in a bee’s developmental stage, is shown in the table below.

Honey bee life cycle