Hi all

We typically tell folks a queen bee can live up to 6 years, but I wonder where this idea came from. Page and Peng, writing in 2001, state:

> Workers typically live 3–6 weeks during the spring and summer and can live about 4 months during the winter. Queens are longer lived. Anecdotes of queens living 2–3 years are not unusual, though they normally live less than a year in commercial hives. Little is known about the life span of drones.

>Seeley (1978) reported that 79% of queens survived for one year in unmanaged colonies, 26% for 2 years, and no queen survived 3 years. One controlled study of queen survival in commercial colonies in California demonstrated that only 61% of established queens lived longer than 10 months (Gordon et al., 1995). 

Page, R. E., & Peng, C. Y. S. (2001). Aging and development in social insects with emphasis on the honey bee, Apis mellifera L. Experimental gerontology, 36(4), 695-711.

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