There are three kinds of bees which live in a hive:

The queen which is an egg-layer and is normally one in a hive.

The drones are males and develop from unfertilized eggs - a situation called parthenogenesis.

The workers do all the work and collect the food which includes pollen and nectar. They are sterile females.

The workers' egg- laying tube is turned into a barbed sting which will get trapped in the victim's body and effort to pull it out by the insect will only rip it of its internal organs leading to death.

The stings of wasps and the queen bee are not barbed and so those can sting several times and the insect will not die.

Workers mould wax from their wax glands using saliva to form combs made of compartments called cells.

The top cells in a comb are for storage of honey, the middle cells are for storage of pollen and the bottom cells are for rearing young.

When nectar is sucked up into the stomach by the workers, it is turned into honey.

Worker bees have a special zig-zag dance used to communicate to others in the hive about the whereabouts of food in terms of direction and distance from the hive.

Life history:

The drone mates with the queen and thereafter, the drone is chased out of the hive as its internal organs would have been ripped out as a result of the mating and so it finally dies.

The queen lays eggs in the bottom cells of the combs i.e. the small cells for the workers, the medium cells for the drones and the large cells for the queens.

The eggs hatch to larvae and the queens-to-be are fed on royal jelly from the mouths of the workers. The others are fed on pollen and honey.

After a week the workers seal the cells with a waxy lid to allow for pupation.

Later adult workers, drones and queens appear.

Swarming:

When there are more than one queen in a hive, the old queen leaves with many workers after eating a lot of honey - an action called swarming. They then settle on branch of a tree and make a new hive there.

Swarming bees do not usually sting.