Inside the hive

The queen

Each colony has one queen, and she's the mother of nearly every bee in the hive. At the height of summer she can lay well over a thousand eggs a day. She doesn't rule the hive; the workers decide when to raise a new queen, when to swarm, and how the colony spends its energy.

The workers

Worker bees are all female, and they do almost everything. A worker's job changes as she ages:

• First days: cleaning cells and keeping the nest tidy
• Nurse bee: feeding larvae and tending the queen
• Builder: making beeswax and shaping it into comb
• Guard: standing watch at the entrance
• Forager: flying out for nectar, pollen and water, usually for the last weeks of her life

A summer worker lives about six weeks. Bees raised in fall live for months, because their job is to carry the colony through winter.

The drones

Drones are the male bees. They don't gather food or sting; their one job is to mate with a queen from another colony. When fall arrives and food gets scarce, the workers push them out of the hive.

How bees make honey

A forager sips nectar from flowers and carries it home in a special honey stomach. Back at the hive she passes it to other bees, who add enzymes and spread it into wax cells. The bees fan their wings to evaporate the water until the nectar thickens into honey, then seal each cell with a cap of fresh wax. It takes the work of many bees, and visits to a huge number of flowers, to fill a single jar.

How bees share directions

When a forager finds a good patch of flowers, she returns and performs the "waggle dance" on the comb. The angle of her dance points the way relative to the sun, and its length tells the others how far to fly.

A year in the hive

• Winter: bees cluster together and shiver to keep the queen warm, living on stored honey.
• Spring: the queen lays more eggs and the colony grows quickly as flowers return.
• Summer: the main nectar flow. In the Pacific Northwest, blackberry blossoms are one of the biggest sources, which is why so much local wildflower honey carries their character.
• Fall: the colony shrinks, drones are sent out, and the bees settle in on their stores for winter.