Why do bees have queens? And other bee stuff.

The queen (right) with larger, darker body, bigger than colony worker bees and lives several times longer

Honey bees have queens, a female who lays essentially all of the eggs for the colony. But most bees don’t have queens. With about 20,000 species of bees worldwide – that’s about 2 trillion bees – the majority of them don’t even live in groups. They do just fine without queens or colonies.

Instead, a single female lays eggs in a simple nest, either inside a plant stem or an underground tunnel. She provides each egg with a ball of pollen mixed with nectar that she collected from flowers, and she leaves the eggs to hatch and develop on their own. She doesn’t have anyone to help with this process.

One honey bee colony – also called a hive – may have more than 50,000 bees, while bumble bee colonies usually have just a few hundred bees. Stingless bee colonies are often small, but some are as large as the biggest honey bee hives.

These bees’ social structures have two more things in common besides the egg-laying queen: the female workers who care for the colony, and the males, sometimes called “drones.”

Notice the males are not included in the “worker” group. Males generally don’t help collect nectar or pollen, protect and maintain the hive, or care for the young larvae. The females do all of those jobs.

Instead, the males have one task: to find and then mate with a female who may become a future queen. After building their strength, males leave the hive to join thousands of other drones to wait for new queens that are also looking for mates. If males are lucky enough to mate, they die soon afterward. In contrast, females typically mate with many different males before starting their lives as egg-laying queens.

Unlike human queens who lead their people, bee queens don’t rule over their workers. Instead, particularly for honey bees, the queen is rather isolated from what’s happening in the hive. Remember, she just lays eggs, up to 2,000 in a day. The workers surround and take care of her while managing the colony. The queen bee might live for a few years, much longer than female worker bees and drones. Video below.