# The Bee Life Cycle: From Egg to Adult, and How Long Bees Live
Two questions about bees come up more than any others, and they turn out to be the same story told from two ends. How does a bee develop from an egg into the insect you see on a flower, and how long does it live once it gets there.
The answers hold a few genuine surprises. A bee is rebuilt from the inside out by complete metamorphosis, the same process that turns a caterpillar into a butterfly. The three kinds of bee in a colony take different lengths of time to make and then live for wildly different spans, from a few weeks to a few years. And the queen decides the sex of every single egg herself, at the moment she lays it.
The four stages of a bee’s life
Honey bees are holometabolous, which is the scientific way of saying they undergo complete metamorphosis. They pass through four stages that look nothing alike and do nothing alike.
It starts with the egg. A queen lays a tiny white egg, like a grain of rice standing on end, at the bottom of a cell. It stays there for about three days, and spotting these eggs is how a beekeeper confirms a laying queen is present, as our beehive inspection guide covers.
Then the egg hatches into a larva, a legless white grub curled in the bottom of its cell. This is the eating stage. Nurse bees feed the larva almost constantly, and it grows at an astonishing rate for about six days before the workers cap the cell over with wax.
Sealed inside that capped cell, the larva becomes a pupa. This is where the transformation happens, the grub reorganizing completely into the recognizable body of an adult bee, with legs, wings, eyes, and everything else forming in the dark.
Finally the finished adult chews her way out of the cell and joins the colony.
How long a bee takes to make
The three castes take different amounts of time to develop from egg to emerging adult, and the differences are consistent enough that beekeepers use them to read a frame.
| Caste | Egg to adult |
|---|---|
| Queen | About 16 days |
| Worker | About 21 days |
| Drone | About 24 days |
A worker’s 21 days break down into roughly 3 days as an egg, 6 days as a larva, and 12 days as a pupa in the capped cell. The queen is the quickest to develop, which makes sense given that a colony raising a new queen usually needs her urgently. The drone takes longest, held up by a longer pupal stage.
Knowing these numbers is genuinely useful at the hive. If you can see eggs, a queen was laying within the last three days. If you know a worker emerges around day 21, you can judge the age of capped brood and time your inspections and treatments around it.
How long do bees live?
This is where bees get strange, because the answer depends entirely on which bee you mean, and the range is enormous.
A summer worker lives only about four to six weeks. She is born, she works without pause, and she wears out fast, for reasons worth their own section below.
A worker born in late summer or fall is a different creature. She becomes a winter bee, physiologically built with fat reserves to survive the cold months, and she can live four to six months, holding the colony together until spring. Our winter beekeeping guide covers how these winter bees carry a colony through.
A queen lives far longer than any of her daughters, about three to five years and occasionally up to seven. In practice many beekeepers replace her every one or two seasons as her laying slows, which our queen bees for sale guide covers.
A drone lives at most a single season, and dies one of two ways covered further down.
| Bee | Lifespan |
|---|---|
| Summer worker | 4 to 6 weeks |
| Winter worker | 4 to 6 months |
| Queen | 3 to 5 years, up to 7 |
| Drone | A single season at most |
Why worker bees live such different lengths
The gap between a six-week summer worker and a six-month winter worker is one of the more remarkable things about bees, and the reason is how a worker spends her time.
A summer worker moves through a sequence of jobs as she ages. She begins her adult life as a house bee, cleaning cells and feeding larvae as a nurse. As she gets older she takes on wax building, food storage, and guard duty at the entrance. Only in the final stretch of her life does she become a forager, flying out to gather nectar and pollen.
Foraging is punishing work. A forager flies enormous distances, wears her wings ragged, and burns through her body, and it is this last phase that kills her within days. Our bee behavior guide covers what that foraging looks like, and our bee anatomy guide covers the wings that wear out.
Winter bees never enter that phase. With no foraging to do and no brood to raise through the cold, they stay in the cluster in a kind of suspended animation, which is why they last through months that a summer bee would never survive.
The drone’s short life
Drones get their own mention because their fate is the bluntest in the colony.
A drone exists for one purpose, to mate with a queen, and he dies either way. If he succeeds, mating with a queen on her mating flight, he dies in the act itself, since the mating is physically fatal to him.
If he does not succeed, he lives out the warm months in relative comfort, fed and tolerated by the workers. Then autumn comes, the colony turns its attention to surviving winter, and the drones become mouths it cannot afford. The workers stop feeding them and drive them out of the hive, where they die of cold and starvation.
It reads as harsh, but it is ordinary colony economics rather than cruelty. A beekeeper who sees drones being dragged out and refused entry in fall is watching a healthy colony do exactly what it should to get through winter.
How bees reproduce
Bee reproduction has a twist that catches almost everyone off guard: the queen chooses the sex of every egg she lays, one at a time.
She only ever mates early in her life, storing all the sperm she will ever use in an organ called the spermatheca. From then on, as she moves across the comb laying eggs, she decides each time whether to fertilize the egg. If she releases stored sperm onto it, the egg is fertilized and becomes a female. If she lays it unfertilized, it becomes a male drone.
The consequence is a genuinely odd piece of biology. A drone develops from an unfertilized egg, which means he has a mother but no father at all. Every female in the hive, by contrast, comes from a fertilized egg.
Then comes the part that surprises people most. A fertilized egg does not have to become a worker. It can become a queen instead, and diet alone decides which. A larva fed royal jelly continuously develops into a queen, while one moved onto ordinary food develops into a worker. Workers and queens are genetically identical. The only thing that separates a colony’s ruler from its laborers is what they were fed as larvae. Our guide to the three bee castes covers the roles each one grows into.
The queen’s mating flight
The queen’s entire romantic career lasts a few days at the start of her life.
A newly emerged virgin queen leaves the hive on a series of mating flights, meeting drones high in the air and mating with a dozen or more of them, often from other colonies. She stores all of that sperm to last the rest of her life, then returns to the hive and never mates again.
That single burst of mating is why drone genetics matter to the whole colony, and why it is such a problem when it goes wrong. A queen that mates poorly, because of bad weather or too few drones in the area, cannot go back and try again, and a colony with a badly mated queen is in trouble it cannot easily fix on its own. Our queen bees for sale guide covers what beekeepers do when a queen fails.
Frequently asked questions
How long do bees live?
It depends on the bee. A worker born in summer lives only about four to six weeks and works herself out foraging, while one born in fall becomes a winter bee and lives four to six months. A queen lives about three to five years, sometimes up to seven, and a drone lives at most a single season.
How long does it take for a bee to develop?
From egg to emerging adult it takes about 16 days for a queen, 21 days for a worker, and 24 days for a drone. A worker spends roughly the first 3 days as an egg, the next 6 as a larva being fed, and the final 12 as a pupa sealed inside a capped cell.
How do bees reproduce?
The queen lays all the eggs, and she controls each one’s sex. She fertilizes an egg from stored sperm to produce a female, or lays it unfertilized to produce a male drone. A fertilized egg then becomes either a worker or a new queen depending entirely on whether the larva is fed royal jelly.
Your next step
For the body that carries out all of this, from the wings that wear out to the sting that is a modified egg-layer, see our bee anatomy guide. For what bees actually do day to day, read bee behavior. And for how winter bees survive the months that would kill a summer bee, see winter beekeeping.
Sources
- Buzz About Bees, the honey bee life cycle, on the four stages and development times.
- How long do honey bees live, lifespan of queens, workers, and drones.
- Nature Scitable, sex determination in honeybees, on the haplodiploid system.