Not many Workers.

Not Many People Know That number 17!!

The afternoon sun brought the honey bees out in force. These are the workers, colonies will also have a Queen and drones.

Workers are female and have two sets of chromosomes - unlike the drones with only have one set. They are produced from an egg that the queen has selectively fertilized from stored sperm. A typical hive may contain as many as 60,000 worker bees.

You may know that the workers have a wider range of behaviours than either queens or drones, but Not Many People Know That their duties change as they mature.
Workers begin by cleaning out the cell that they grew in and then they eat it, next they feed the brood and then receive nectar. They then progress to cleaning the hive, then guard duty and finally foraging. Some workers engage in other specialized behaviours, such as "undertaking" (removing corpses of their nest-mates).

Here you can see the workers on guard duty at the entrance to the hive, and one is having a tousle with a bee from a neighbouring hive. There are also a couple of foragers in the shot, one just leaving the hive and one entering.

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