The sperm stays viable throughout the queen's life, sometimes for over seven years. The females will develop into workers or a queen based upon what she is fed as a larva. A queen is formed by feeding a female larva a larger amount of a high protein food, called Royal Jelly, for a longer period of time, so that her ovaries develop. The drones live only to mate with the new young queens and die after mating. There are normally one to five thousand drones in a colony during the summer but they are dumped out in the fall to starve since they serve no function in winter.
Bees are insects and have the stages of egg, larva, pupa, and adult.
The egg hatches into a larval worm that feeds heavily on royal jelly and beebread, a mixture of honey and pollen until it spins a cocoon, entering the pupa stage. A few days later an adult honeybee emerges from the cocoon, grabs some food, and goes to work. The workers can sting but they have a barbed stinger that stays in the animal stung and is pulled out of the bee with an attached poison sack which continues to pump venom while the bee soon bleeds to death. Thus, the honeybees thus generally only sting to defend the colony unless they are being smashed and figure they might as well go down fighting. Hives of the honeybee can normally be opened and manipulated without stings if movements are slow and gentle.