The colony...

So 14 million bees were spilled out on the highway in Washington state yesterday when the tractor trailer truck that was transporting them rolled over.  So many good hives down!  Everyone was fine, aside from multiple stings from the millions of seriously peeved bees.  Poor little things.

My own bees should be enroute as well; hopefully with more success than the bees above.  I'm trying to figure out when exactly my girls will arrive because I haven't heard anything yet, which is weird.  I will get about 3 lbs of worker bees (about 30,000) and 1 mated queen (meaning she has already mated and will be ready to lay eggs).  A few basics about the colony:

The queen's purpose in life is basically to reproduce; she lays brood day in day out.  This is actually really helpful when trying to figure out if you have a failing queen, or a dead queen.  If you check your frames and notice that either the queen is laying all over the frame in a random, willy nilly way, or if you notice that you only have brood in the late stages of growth and no fresh brood, you know something is amiss.  The queen, when healthy, will lay in a very organized, methodical pattern, and she will lay every day which means that you should always have brood of every stage of development.  She will also usually separate her worker larvae from her drone larvae, so if they become intermingled this is cause for concern.  Drone brood are easy to spot because they are encapsulated in cells that are not flush with the comb (like that of a worker) but they stick out torpedo like from the comb.

Your worker bees will do exactly that: work.  They generally do not lay any eggs although they have the capacity to do so.  They each have a specific job and they spend their life doing it.  These gals literally make it all happen.  They find sources of food and water, they inform the rest of the hive where it is and how to get there, they collect pollen and nectar, they build honeycomb, make honey, help to regulate the temperature in the hive, and they protect the queen.  Pretty cool little things.  Worker bees will be a big focus of many postings as they are the complicated, highly specialized and incredibly impressive backbone of any successful colony.

Drones? They are just dudes, looking out for their own evolutionary survival.  Their goal in life is to mate with a queen. Period.  I have very little understanding of their contribution above and beyond this. Anyone?