harvest and for defence. Everything is useful to the community.
These different tasks are carried out by worker-bees depending on their age.
Worker-bees live for a much shorter period than queen-bees, only six weeks if they're born in spring or a few months if they're born in the fall, while the queen-bee lives up to five years. The drones are the males in the family. There are only a few hundred of them, born in spring from eggs that the queen-bee hasn't fecundated. They are bigger than the worker-bees and are incapable of feeding autonomously because their ligula is too short. They stay with the family until the food reserves start to run low and then they are pitilessly turned away.
Drones are fertile and their task is to fertilise the virgin queen-bees.