Sometimes I think we make things too complicated. The life span of honeybees is one. Let’s start with the larva. They are fed a combination of honey, pollen and royal jelly except for the queen, which is fed 100% royal jelly. This royal jelly is a mix of vitamins, minerals and proteins secreted from the hypopharyngeal gland in the bees head and is obtained from flowers that produce nectar and pollen. Larva that is destined to be a worker or a drone is only fed half rations of royal jelly. The queen is then fed a steady diet of royal jelly. This how she is able to lay a thousand eggs a day or what ever number you choose. It is a lot to ask of an insect to do this. Keep in mind that this is due to the fact that her diet is the best that the nurse bees can provide. The fact that a fertilized larva can turn into a queen is testament to what a good diet can do. I have often heard the phrase that the “bees make nice fat bees to live through the winter.” I don’t see how you can make fat bees with an exoskeleton. Bees that eat too much turn it into a fatty acid named beeswax. I believe that during the late fall or early winter when the bees stop raising young bees, the glands in the bees head that produce the royal jelly continue to function, but rather than use the royal jelly to feed larva the royal jelly is absorbed by the bees allowing them to live longer. There is not magic here. The bees eat honey and pollen only. There is a great lesson here to be learned about our own eating habits. If we worked as hard as worker bees we would not live very long either. We would wear out working from sun up to sun down during the nectar flow. Another reason why bees live longer in the winter is because they are not doing much work. IMHO Bill Bartlett *********************************************** 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 Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at: http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm