Study
The Biology of the Honey Bee
Winston, Mark L.
Harvard University Press, 1987
A monograph synthesising honey bee anatomy, colony life cycle, caste determination, division of labour, reproduction, foraging and disease.
- Studied in
- Apis mellifera
- Sample size
- monographic synthesis of honey bee biology
A summer worker lives about six weeks and moves through a sequence of jobs with age — cell cleaning, brood feeding, wax building, guarding, then foraging. Winter bees live for months. The queen mates once, on a small number of nuptial flights, and lays for years from stored sperm.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Colony function rests on age-based division of labour and on caste determination by larval diet, not on individual assignment.
How NatureHQ reads it
Reference consensus for the natural history the mechanism pages assumed and never stated. It also fixes the scope problem that runs through everything written about bees: this describes Apis mellifera. A bumblebee colony lasts one season and dies; most of the roughly 20,000 bee species are solitary and have no colony, no honey and no queen. "Bees do X" is nearly always a claim about one domesticated species.
- One species, and largely managed rather than wild colonies.
- Predates the varroa and colony-loss literature that now dominates applied bee research.
- Figures are typical values with real variation by subspecies, season and climate.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Honey bee
A honey bee worker dies when it stings you — because the barb was built for insects
Honey bee
A hive holds its brood nest near 35 °C all year — a warm-blooded object made of cold-blooded animals
Honey bee
Honey bees do not hibernate and the colony does not die — it clusters and burns honey all winter
Honey bee
A queen and a worker are genetically identical — the difference is what the larva was fed
Published by: Academic book publishersPublished as an academic monograph.
Search for this paper by title and author
Reference details for this record were entered editorially and have not been confirmed against a bibliographic register. The title, authors, journal and year are enough to locate the paper; we would rather say this than publish an identifier we have not verified.
A note on this reference: Unresolved: title 97%, author NOT matched, year exact; single register (crossref); a register was unreachable on this run — witnessed today by crossref
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-10.