What do Baby Bees Look Like? Bee larvae look like tiny white grubs. Beekeepers call larvae – uncapped brood or “milk brood”.

The scientific name for a baby bee is “larvae.” Larvae hatch from the eggs that are laid by the queen within the honeycombs of the bee hive. Once a larvae emerges from its egg, it is fed a nutritious substance called royal jelly.

The queen lays a fertilized (female) or unfertilized (male) egg according to the width of the cell. Drones are raised in cells that are significantly larger than the cells used for workers. The queen fertilizes the egg by selectively releasing sperm from her spermatheca as the egg passes through her oviduct.

The queen is the mother of the hive. There is only one queen and each day she has to lay the 1000 or so eggs that will develop into new honeybees.

Interestingly, queen honeybee stingers are also much smoother than worker stingers and queens can sting humans multiple times without dying. But to the best of our knowledge, they don’t have an understanding of their impending death if they sting.

Most animals reproduce sexually, which means that both males and females are required for the species to survive. Normally, the honeybee is no exception to this rule: the female queen bee produces new offspring by laying eggs that have been fertilised by sperm from male drones.

The average number of drones with which a queen mates is 12. The queen stores the semen from her mating flights for the remainder of her life, two-to-three years for a long-lived queen. However, some queens are not so long-lived. They are rejected by the workers of the hive.

A queen mates during the first 1-2 weeks of her adult life. She can take multiple mating flights and mated with several males – on average 12-15. Increasing the genetic diversity of the colony is important for colony productivity and disease resistance.

Queens Only Have Sex Once in their Life Queens mate in the air with as many drones as possible. So, technically she does have sex multiple times over the course of a day or two, but she only mates for this one period in her life.