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Each hive box contains a totally independent community of bees. Each rises or falls on the ability of its queen to lay the thousands of eggs through which each swarm of bees is perpetuated. When her subjects (sisters) decide she is no longer able to provide for the swarm’s future she is “superceded” by a new young queen whom the swarm has created.
This queen “superceder” occurs once every three or four years.
Some of the jobs assumed through some mysterious automatic procedure in the hive could be described this way. When, after 21 days, a worker bee emerges from her cell she becomes the house bee. As such she will immediately start to work either as a housekeeper cleaning up the inside of the hive box, as a nurse feeding the queen or the young larva, as a ventilator, as a repairer, as a water carrier, as an undertaker carrying out dead bees, as a honey producer, as a capper of honey cells full of ripe honey, as a guard, or in some of the other essential tasks in the hive.
After three weeks she is “promoted” to outside work where she becomes a scout searcher for sources of nectar and pollen, a forager bringing in the nectar and pollen (this is the hardest job of all because in three weeks of intense flying she will wear out her wings and thus be doomed to death), as a guard, or as a water carrier.
During a working day, a scout or forager bee will make 10 to 12 trips of up to two miles each. She will fly up to 150 miles a week and possibly 4,500 miles in less than a month. It takes 25,000 bee trips to make one pound of honey.
Presently the fun of beekeeping can be illustrated by this little poem written by a practicing beekeeper:
For Easter
and for
after.
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