A Week at Bee Camp
1Soraya Petrakis, a sixth grader, spent a week at a summer bee camp run by a university's research apiary. Campers wore veils and gloves and stood back while bee scientist Dr. Ezekiel Thornbury opened the hives. The camp, the people and the numbers here are made up, but they are based on real honeybee studies.
2A honeybee colony has one queen, thousands of female workers and, in summer, a few hundred male drones. The queen lays all the eggs. A fertilized egg can become either a worker or a queen. An egg that is not fertilized becomes a drone, so a drone gets genes from his mother only. Each egg is laid in a wax cell. In a healthy hive, the queen lays fertilized eggs in small worker cells and unfertilized eggs in larger drone cells. When the colony raises a new queen, workers build a big, cup-shaped queen cell around a young larva.
3After an egg hatches, the larva is fed by young workers called nurse bees. For about its first three days, every larva gets royal jelly, a rich food made in glands in the nurse bees' heads. After that, nurse bees switch worker larvae to a plainer mix that includes pollen and honey. A larva in a queen cell keeps getting plenty of royal jelly for its whole time as a larva. Drone larvae in drone cells also switch to the plainer mix but are given more of it.
4Beekeepers raise queens by grafting. They lift very young larvae out of worker cells with a tiny brush and set each one in a plastic queen cup. A colony with no queen then feeds the larvae in the cups as queens. Dr. Thornbury grafted 20 larvae of each age, counted in days since hatching. He also marked 20 one-day-old larvae that he left in their worker cells. He weighed every adult on the day it came out of its cell. Last, he showed the campers a frame from a hive whose old queen had stopped fertilizing her eggs, so drones were growing in small worker cells.