Western Honey Bee

• A colony can hold up to 60,000 bees with a single breeding queen.
• The queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day at the height of the season.
• It pollinates roughly a third of the world's food crops.
• comunicaciónIt communicates with the rest of the hive through a dance whose coded movements give the exact direction and distance of a food source.
• fisiologíaIt regulates the temperature inside the hive by fanning its wings in unison, keeping it relatively stable even when the temperature outside varies widely.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton

Habitat and environment

Practically any habitat with flowers: fields, woodland, towns and farmland across almost the whole world

Birth weight

An egg under 2 mm; a microscopic newly hatched larva

Size at birth

The larva feeds in its wax cell for 4-7 days, depending on caste

Sexual maturity

Queen: able to breed within days of emerging, after the nuptial flight

Gestation / incubation

Egg to adult: queen 16 days | worker 21 days | drone 24 days

Litter / clutch size

The queen can lay 1,500-2,000 eggs a day at the height of the season

Life expectancy in captivity

Queen: up to 8 years documented in exceptional cases

Sources consulted: ScienceDirect (Page & Peng 2001); AnAge (genomics.senescence.info); Animal Diversity Web; PMC (Evolution and mechanisms of long life in queen honey bees); BuzzAboutBees