A honey bee colony is a community of bees living together as a single superorganism. Its social structure is highly ordered: a single reproductive female, the queen; thousands of infertile female workers; and a few hundred male drones present during the warm season. Depending on the time of year, a typical colony contains between 20,000 bees in winter and more than 60,000 at peak season in summer.
The three castes have dramatically different lifespans. A queen can live two to five years, the longest of any bee in the colony. Summer workers live about six weeks, while winter workers can survive four to six months because they expend less energy on foraging. Drones live only a few weeks during the warm season and are expelled from the hive before winter.
Brood, the term for bee larvae and pupae developing in cells, develops on predictable timelines. From egg to adult takes 21 days for a worker, only 16 days for a queen, and 24 days for a drone. What determines whether a larva becomes a queen is feeding: all larvae receive royal jelly, a protein-rich secretion, for a brief period, but only those fed royal jelly exclusively develop into queens. As workers age, they progress through a clear sequence of tasks: cleaning cells, nursing larvae and the queen, building wax comb, guarding the entrance, and finally foraging outside the hive.