How a Honeybee Colony Works: Queen, Workers, Drones and the Waggle Dance

Nature · Published 2026-10-25

A simple illustration of a striped honeybee resting on golden hexagonal honeycomb cells of different shades — Hexagonal comb, built from wax that worker bees produce from glands under the abdomen. Original illustration for Footnoted.

A honeybee colony behaves less like a crowd of insects than like a single organism. One queen lays the eggs, tens of thousands of sterile female workers do everything else, and a few hundred males, the drones, exist mainly to mate. There is no leader giving orders: the colony's decisions emerge from many small exchanges between bees. This page explains how the western honeybee, Apis mellifera, organises its hive.

Three kinds of bee

The queen

The queen is the only fully fertile female in a normal colony and the mother of almost every bee in it. A few days after emerging she flies out on one or more mating flights, mates in the air with a number of drones, and stores their sperm for the rest of her life, which can last several years. Back in the hive she does little but lay eggs; at the height of the season a productive queen can lay well over a thousand a day. Her chemical signals, the queen pheromones, spread through the colony as workers touch and feed her, and they help to keep the workers' own ovaries inactive.

The workers

Workers are females, like the queen, but they are raised on a different diet and do not normally reproduce. They make up nearly the whole population, which in summer reaches tens of thousands in a strong colony. A worker's sting is barbed: used against a mammal, it lodges in the skin and tears away from the bee, which then dies. Against another insect it can usually be pulled out again. The queen's sting is smooth, and she uses it mainly against rival queens.

The drones

Drones are males. They have no sting, do not collect food and are fed by workers. Their role is to mate with a queen from another colony, and a drone that succeeds dies in the act. As food runs short in autumn, workers stop feeding the remaining drones and drag them out of the hive.

Same egg, different bee

Whether an egg becomes a female or a male depends on fertilisation. The queen can release stored sperm as she lays: a fertilised egg develops into a female, and an unfertilised one into a drone. Whether a female becomes a worker or a queen depends on food. All young larvae receive royal jelly, a protein-rich secretion from glands in the heads of young workers, but worker larvae are switched after a few days to a diet that includes pollen and honey, while a larva destined to be a queen is fed generously on royal jelly throughout, in a large peanut-shaped cell that hangs from the comb.

Development times, from egg to adult, are among the most quoted facts in beekeeping:

Bee	Days from egg to adult	Typical adult life
Queen	about 16	several years
Worker	about 21	around 5–6 weeks in summer; several months for bees raised in autumn
Drone	about 24	weeks; evicted in autumn

The difference in a worker's lifespan is striking. Summer workers wear themselves out foraging, while the bees raised at the end of the season, which do little flying and cluster together to keep warm, can survive the whole winter.

A career that changes with age

Workers change jobs as they get older, a pattern biologists call age polyethism. A typical summer worker begins by cleaning cells, then becomes a nurse that feeds larvae, then builds comb, processes nectar and stores pollen. Towards the end of her third week she may guard the entrance, and for the last part of her life she forages outside. The schedule is flexible: if a colony loses its foragers, some younger bees start foraging early.

Comb is built from wax that young workers secrete as thin flakes from glands on the underside of the abdomen. The cells are hexagonal for a good geometric reason: among shapes that tile a flat surface into equal cells, the regular hexagon encloses a given area with the least total wall length, a result long suspected and finally proved by the mathematician Thomas Hales in 1999 as the "honeycomb conjecture". To make honey, workers collect nectar, add enzymes and fan their wings over the open cells to evaporate water until the honey is thick enough to keep, then seal the cells with wax. The international Codex Alimentarius standard for honey sets a general maximum moisture content of 20%.

The waggle dance

A forager that finds a rich patch of flowers returns and performs a dance on the vertical comb in the dark hive. In the "waggle run" she walks straight ahead while shaking her abdomen, then circles back and repeats. The Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch showed that the dance encodes a map. The angle of the waggle run relative to straight up on the comb gives the direction of the food relative to the sun, and the length of the run indicates the distance. Von Frisch shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen for their discoveries about individual and social behaviour patterns.

All of this is done with a very small brain. The honeybee brain is usually estimated at just under a million neurons, against the roughly 86 billion counted in the human brain described on our page about the central nervous system. Bees also lack anything like our internal skeleton: instead of the 206 bones covered in our page on the bones of the body, an insect is supported by a hard outer exoskeleton.

Swarming: how a colony reproduces

A colony multiplies by splitting. In spring, when the hive is crowded, workers raise new queens, and shortly before the first one emerges the old queen leaves with a large part of the workforce. The swarm settles in a cluster on a branch while a few hundred scout bees inspect possible new homes, such as hollow trees. Scouts advertise the sites they like with dances, and the biologist Thomas Seeley showed that the swarm reaches its choice through a kind of competition: support for the best site grows until enough scouts gather there at once, and the whole swarm then flies off to it. Seeley describes the process in his book Honeybee Democracy (2010).

Enemies and defences

Honeybees face predators, parasites and disease. One of the most dramatic threats is the northern giant hornet, which can kill large numbers of bees and occupy a hive. Western honeybees, introduced to Asia relatively recently, have little defence against it, but native Japanese honeybees fight back by smothering a scout hornet in a ball of vibrating bees, a story told in our page on the giant Asian hornet.

Quick quiz: honeybees

Sources

Winston, M. L. (1987). The Biology of the Honey Bee. Harvard University Press.
Seeley, T. D. (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Honeybee (consulted October 2026).
The Nobel Prize, The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973.
Hales, T. C. (1999). The Honeycomb Conjecture. arXiv:math/9906042; published in Discrete & Computational Geometry 25 (2001).
Menzel, R. and Giurfa, M. (2001). Cognitive architecture of a mini-brain: the honeybee. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5(2): 62–71.
FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius, Standard for Honey (CXS 12-1981).