First Stage: Cleaning Brood Cells

As soon as the worker bees hatch, they begin supporting activities in the hive in a most surprising manner. They have no guides or teachers to show them what to do, yet from the moment they emerge from their cells, they behave in a very conscious manner. Each bee has its own specific duties. Tens of thousands of bees act with complete harmony, and order in the hive is quickly established with no confusion ever arising.

When it first emerges from its cell, a bee’s body is soaking wet, its hairs all stuck together. It combs out these hairs with its feet and then immediately sets about cleaning the brood cell from which it emerged, making it ready for the queen to lay another egg within.

A worker bee's first job is cleaning. Emerging from the pupa, a bee immediately sets about this task. Beginning with its own cell, it cleans the brood cells for the first two days. Since the queen lays eggs constantly, there is an ongoing need for empty cells. As the cells empty out, they therefore need to be cleaned in preparation for new eggs.

The worker bee enters the cell it is to clean and remains in it sometimes for several minutes, carefully licking and cleaning the cell walls. In addition, the new-hatched worker bees also spend their first two days exploring the hive in order to get their bearings-since later in their lives, the workers will be responsible for the general cleanliness of the hive as a whole.15

One of the most important duties of worker bees is the cleanliness of the hive. The picture to the side shows worker bees opening the covers of the cells from which the larvae have emerged, checking whether these cells are fit for the queen to lay eggs in, and occupying themselves with cleaning.

Second Stage: Tending Larvae

From the third day of their lives onward, worker bees set about the task of feeding the larvae, and take great pains over every detail of this job.16

Bee larvae require greater care and attention than the young of many other animals. But what is significant here is that how the larvae are fed changes according to such factors as the age of the larvae and their future roles within the hive. In their care of the larvae, the nurse bees stick to a special feeding menu.

The larvae in the hive all vary according to their age and how they must be fed. Despite this, the worker bees feed the larvae in total order, with no confusion ever arising over the duties they will perform in the hive. The workers visit the larvae in their cells throughout the day and look after them with the greatest care.

Care of the larvae takes place in two phases, depending on their ages:

• Worker bees spend the third through the fifth days of their lives feeding those larvae which have completed their third days. These they feed with the foodstuff known as "bee bread," a mixture of pollen and honey.17 Since larvae younger than three days are unable to digest this bee bread, they are given different food:
• Newly-hatched larvae are given a kind of milk that the worker bees secrete. When the worker bees are six days old, a pair of glands on their heads go into action. These organs, known as the hypopharyngeal glands, secrete a very special substance known as "royal jelly," whose properties have astonished scientists. This is because whether a larva turns into a queen bee or a worker depends on whether it's fed this substance which the workers secrete. The nurse bees feed royal jelly to the larvae only for the first three days after hatching from their eggs; after which, as we have seen above, the larvae are then fed on bee bread.

However, bee bread is never fed to a larva that is intended to turn into a queen. Unlike other larvae, future queens are fed on royal jelly throughout their larval stage.18

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• 15.Mark L. Winston, The Biology of the Honey Bee, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Unv. Press, 5th ed., 1995, p.96
• 16.Mark L. Winston, The Biology of the Honey Bee, p.97
• 17.Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, Vol.2, p.106
• 18. Ibid.

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