Healthy honey bee colonies include one queen, many female workers, and some male, drones (during the breeding season). The queen lays a single egg in each brood cell in the hive. The egg becomes a larva on day 3. The house bees feed and warm the larva 24 hours a day, until they are fat and ready to pupate. At that time, the larva cells are capped by the house bees and pupation/metamorphisis begins. When pupation is complete, an adult bee emerges from the capped cell.
Queen bee larva are fed a special diet of royal jelly during the larval stage. The queens’ developmental time and lifespan are longer than that of worker bees. Pupating queen cells look like peanuts with a beautiful texture on the outside!
