> Be interested to know more; I had 9 years in my memory, but not sure where the figure came from.

I am sorry, I should have mentioned that they weren't specifically referring to honey bees. Probably they had in mind ants. But even so, from the same egg one gets bees that live up to 6 weeks, or up to 6 months, or up to 6 years. This has less to do with what they are doing, than it has to do with an aging program. 

Summer bees follow a short lifespan program. It is easy to see the benefit of this: the colony can produce a large number of foragers who bring in the harvest and then conveniently die off. The colony can shrink down to a minimum size to ride out the winter season, then ramp up again in spring. 

I don't think anyone has a grasp of what the program is for queen lifespan and supersedure. We have all seen perfectly good queens (to our eyes) get replaced. And yet completely tuckered out queens are sometimes not superseded and the colony fizzles out as a result. One must remember that these are living beings, and not programmed robots.

PLB

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html