In three or four days each egg (which looks like a tiny grain of rice) hatches into a little white grub, and later the nurse bees begin to feed it—no, not honey, but a kind of milk—honey bee milk—which the nurses make. The little grub feeds on this for three days, then is given richer bee-milk, and grows very rapidly, turning into a chrysalis on the fifth or sixth day. It spins around itself a silken cocoon, and is sealed into its cell by another set of worker bees.
In about two weeks it turns into a full-fledged worker bee; but there she is all sealed up in the cell. How can she get out?
It doesn’t take long for her to discover she has a sharp pair of jaws, and she bites her way out. She is very pale and weak, so the nurse bees begin to clean and feed her.
As soon as she gains strength, she gets right to work on some task like feeding grub-babies; and perhaps after two weeks of such work, she flies away to gather nectar.
The Drone Baby Bee
The Drone Bee is hatched in the same way, only it takes longer for him to become perfect.
The Queen Baby or Princess
But the Queen Bee is different.
When the worker bees decide they need a queen, the comb builders make three or four queen cells, or “royal cradles,” which are ordinary cells made large by cutting away parts of the next-door cells and building a hanging cell.