Castes
Three jobs. The colony is the animal.
The Social Organization of Honey Bees is the UF/IFAS caste page. Mortensen, Smith, and Ellis. Honey bees hit all three marks of eusocial insects: a few reproduce, workers raise brood that is not their own, and generations overlap in the same box. Chimney bees nest in a crowd and still each provision her own hole. A honey bee pulled off the comb does not run a colony.
Members of these social species cannot survive as individuals; they must live as a part of a colony.
Who does what
Drones are males. Large eyes that meet on the head. Thick, blunt abdomen. Their job is to mate with queens from other yards. The queen is the reproductive female. Head and thorax near worker size, abdomen longer. She lays the offspring for most of the cycle. Workers are usually non-reproductive females, smallest of the three, built for pollen and nectar. They do brood care, comb, defense, and forage. A queen is a year job, not a forever job.
Workers do not pick one job for life. Young bees clean cells, feed brood, and tend the queen in the center of the nest. Mid-age bees build comb, take nectar, store, and fan. The oldest guard, haul dead bees, and forage. The paper names that ladder temporal polyethism. Juvenile hormone moves the glands. A nurse has fat hypopharyngeal glands. A comb builder has wax glands up and those diet glands down. If foragers die in a spray, younger bees jump the queue. If brood fails, older bees step back to nurse work.
Open the box to see the jobs
You see caste on the comb, not on a poster. A hive tool to open a registered stack and look at the jobs. Get this. A frame grip to lift without rolling bees. Get this. This page does not sell a caste chart. Swarming is the split. Workers die after they sting.
Is a chimney bee a colony?
No. The paper uses chimney bees as the crowd that still each builds her own nest. Honey bees need the box.
Does one queen laying mean the colony reproduced?
No. The paper says superorganism reproduction is swarming. Eggs keep the same colony alive.
Sources
- The Social Organization of Honey Bees. Mortensen, Smith, and Ellis. Castes, age work, the colony as the animal.
- Western honey bee. The species page this caste paper points at.