# Queen, Worker, and Drone: The Three Castes of a Bee Colony
A honey bee colony contains three kinds of bee: one queen, tens of thousands of workers, and, in the warm months, a few hundred drones. That much most people know.
What surprises them is how the roles actually divide up. The queen is not in charge of anything. The workers, every one of them female, run the entire operation and change jobs as they age. And the drones, the only males in the place, do no work at all. A colony looks like a monarchy and functions like something much stranger.
This guide covers who does what, and why the usual picture of a bee kingdom gets it backwards.
The three castes at a glance
Before the detail, a map of the whole colony.
| Caste | How many | Sex | Lifespan | Job |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Queen | One | Female | Years | Lay eggs |
| Worker | Tens of thousands | Female | Weeks to months | Everything else |
| Drone | Hundreds, seasonally | Male | A season | Mating |
The numbers and lifespans behind this table are covered in depth in our bee life cycle guide. Here the focus is what each caste actually does.
The queen: egg-layer, not ruler
The queen is the only fertile female in the colony, and laying eggs is her job in the most literal sense. At the peak of the season she lays up to about 2,000 eggs a day, which is more than her own body weight in eggs every twenty-four hours. A colony’s entire population passes through her.
That is where her authority ends, though, because she has none. The queen does not rule the colony, does not direct it, and gives no orders of any kind. The royal name is a leftover from centuries ago, when observers assumed a colony this organized must be led, and for a long time even assumed the large central bee was a king.
Her second real function is chemical. The queen produces a set of pheromones, chiefly what is called queen mandibular pheromone, and that scent is what actually holds the colony together. It signals that she is present and healthy, it coordinates a great deal of colony behavior, and it suppresses the workers’ own ability to reproduce. When beekeepers say a colony is queenright, they mean that pheromone is circulating. The decisions that look like leadership, meanwhile, are made collectively by the workers rather than issued from the top.
She is also completely dependent. A queen cannot feed or groom herself, and is tended constantly by a retinue of workers. Physically she is longer than a worker, with a smooth tapered abdomen, which our bee anatomy guide covers, and our queen bees for sale guide covers how beekeepers find, mark, and replace her.
The workers: the females who run everything
If the queen does not run the colony, the workers do, collectively. They are sterile females, and they carry out essentially every task in the hive except laying eggs and mating.
The elegant part is how the work is organized, which is not by assignment but by age. The concept is called temporal polyethism, and it means a worker moves through a career of different jobs as she gets older.
A newly emerged worker starts at the bottom, cleaning out cells so they can be used again. Within a few days she becomes a nurse bee, feeding the developing larvae, and it is relentless work: a single larva may be checked and fed up to 1,300 times a day. Around days 12 to 18 her wax glands mature, and she shifts to building comb, taking in nectar from returning foragers, and packing pollen into cells. Later she moves to guarding the entrance and fanning her wings to cool the hive and cure honey. And finally, at around two to three weeks old, she graduates to foraging, flying out to gather nectar, pollen, and water for the rest of her life.
Nobody hands out these roles. A worker simply ages into each stage. Our bee behavior guide covers what that foraging looks like, and our bee life cycle guide covers why the foraging phase wears a summer worker out so quickly.
When workers start laying eggs
The queen’s suppressing pheromone has a consequence worth understanding, because it shows up as a real problem in the hive.
Normally that pheromone keeps the workers’ ovaries switched off. But if a colony loses its queen and goes too long without her, and without the young brood that also helps suppress them, the suppression lifts and some workers begin to develop functioning ovaries and lay eggs.
The trouble is that a worker has never mated. She can only lay unfertilized eggs, and those become drones, as our bee life cycle guide explains. So a laying-worker colony produces nothing but males and cannot raise itself a new queen. The giveaway a beekeeper looks for is drone brood in worker-sized cells, often with several eggs dropped haphazardly into a single cell, since laying workers are far clumsier than a queen. A colony in this state is usually doomed without intervention, and our queen bees for sale guide covers requeening.
The drones: the colony’s only males
Drones are the most misread bees in the hive, usually written off as lazy. Their design tells a more specific story.
A drone exists to do one thing, mate with a virgin queen from another colony, and everything about him is built around that single job or stripped away as unnecessary. He has no sting. He has no pollen baskets. He does no work inside the hive at all, and he cannot even feed himself efficiently, relying on workers to feed him. What he does have is a pair of enormous eyes, far larger than a worker’s, for spotting a queen in flight, and drones gather in the air at specific spots called drone congregation areas, waiting for a queen to pass.
His life is short and his end is abrupt, both covered in our bee life cycle guide: he dies in the act of mating, or is thrown out of the hive in autumn once the colony can no longer afford to feed him. Calling him lazy misses the point. The drone is the colony’s genetic reach into the wider population, and without drones no queen anywhere would ever be mated.
A society of sisters
Step back and the whole picture reorganizes around one fact: a bee colony is a society of females.
The queen is female. Every one of the tens of thousands of workers is female. The drones are the only males, they are present only in the warm months, and they do no work. The colony that runs itself all year is run entirely by sisters.
It also has no ruler and no chain of command, which is the part that takes longest to accept. The decisions that look deliberate, when to swarm, which of several new homes to move into, how to respond to a threat, are made collectively, with thousands of workers effectively weighing options and converging on an answer. No individual decides, least of all the queen.
That is why many experienced beekeepers stop thinking of a colony as a group of insects and start thinking of it as a single distributed organism, one creature made of many bodies. The way the whole hive coordinates to turn nectar into honey, covered in our how bees make honey guide, is one small example of that shared mind at work.
Frequently asked questions
What are the three types of bee in a hive?
A colony has one queen, the only fertile female, whose job is to lay eggs; tens of thousands of sterile female workers, who carry out all the work of the hive; and a few hundred male drones, present only in the warm months, whose only role is to mate with a queen.
What do worker bees do?
Almost everything except lay eggs and mate. Workers change jobs as they age, starting by cleaning cells, then nursing larvae, then building comb and storing food, then guarding the entrance, and finally foraging outside the hive for the last part of their lives.
Does the queen bee rule the hive?
No. Despite the name, the queen gives no orders and directs nothing. She lays the eggs and produces pheromones that signal her presence and hold the colony together, but the colony’s decisions are made collectively by the workers rather than dictated from the top.
Your next step
For the bodies that make each caste distinct, from the queen’s tapered abdomen to the drone’s oversized eyes, see our bee anatomy guide. For how each caste develops and how long it lives, read the bee life cycle. And for what the workers actually do out in the world, see bee behavior.
Sources
- Castes of honey bees, roles and responsibilities, on the three castes and their jobs.
- The Apiarist, temporal polyethism, on how worker jobs change with age.
- Chemical communication in the honey bee society, on queen pheromone and colony coordination.