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The Subtle Life of the Bee
can say that worker bees and drones develop inside ‘light cells’. The queen needs only 16 days after
her egg is laid to develop fully. A worker bee takes about 21 days, and thus, it may be deduced that
nature takes much more care in procreating the workers than the queen, while the male drones take
longer to mature, between 24 and 25 days.
In his cycle of lectures on The Bees, Rudolf Steiner provides an interesting picture of how the
cosmos is involved in this gestation. He explains,
The Sun turns on its axis once in twenty-one days. Then it will arrive again at this point and begin
repeating this movement. The worker uses from the Sun just what she needs to achieve its full development. If the worker were to continue in her development beyond this point, she would leave the
Sun development and come into the sphere of infuence that the Earth would exert upon her development. (…) The worker enters into Earth development and experiences it only as an already completely
developed animal, having achieved its full maturity at twenty-one days. (…) Now consider the drone.
It doesn’t “feel,” as I would put it, that it is completed at twenty-one days and wants to continue into
the Earth development phase before it is fnished maturing. It is defnitely an Earth animal, while the
worker is a Sun child, complete within herself. And what about the queen bee? She doesn’t even fnish
the entire Sun cycle of twenty-one days. She lags behind and remains forever a Sun child. (…) With
bees, you can really see what it means to be under the infuence of the Earth or of the Sun: depending upon whether a bee waits to complete the Sun development phase, it will turn out to be a queen, a
worker, or a drone.
Steiner (1998: 8–9)
So, based on Steiner’s intuition, the queen and worker bees are united by the same solar cycle. This
connection has been confrmed by the presence of the queen’s pheromones (Fontana, 2017), by
research on language and communication within the hive (von Frisch, 1976) and by the ability of
bees to process information and develop group strategies (Celli, 2008).
Being the only fertile female in the community, the queen is the mother of all the workers, comprising the future queens and sisters of the drones. Her ability to produce eggs is staggering, often
more than 1,500 per day, which is similar in total weight to that of her own body. The queen is very
different from the drones and the workers: her body is elongated, and her jaws are armed with sharp
teeth, whereas those of her daughters – the workers – are toothless. Also unlike the workers who,
when they sting, can no longer remove the serrated barb and die by being gutted, the queen has a
curved and smooth sting, which is used to destroy premature pretenders to the throne. She lacks
the ‘work tools’ supplied to the workers, such as the pollen baskets, the wax glands and the honey
bag. Unable to feed herself, her diet is exclusively based on the secretions of royal jelly from the
hypopharyngeal glands on the heads of the workers. Queen bees may live for up to 5 or even 7 years.
Worker bees are sterile because they are fed with royal jelly only for the frst 3 days and then
with nectar and honey. If the queen has enough space (in an enlarged and rounded cell) and if she
is fed with royal jelly, she develops her sexual organs. Therefore, as with other animals and partly
in humans, the environment and food to some extent determine the faculties of the subject and what
will be its external work.
Then, there is the drone. The drone is helpless and without a sting. Like the queen, it has no pollen baskets or wax glands and does not secrete royal jelly: its only function is to mate with the queen
and contribute modestly to the ventilation of the hive. It is also not able to feed itself, the workers
feed him. Worker bees are more numerous than drones, and, in a hive in a temperate climate region,
the number of workers varies between 8,000 and 15,000 in springtime and up to 80,000 in early
summer. For the frst 3 weeks of their life, they carry out tasks within the hive: in the frst 3 days –
during which they too are fed with royal jelly – they clean the cells. From days 5–14, they feed on
pollen while producing royal jelly to feed the queen bee and the newborn worker bees. From days
10–16, they are ‘wax bees’, and with their epidermal glands positioned on the abdomen between the
sternites (hard plates forming the sternum), they produce wax, a fatty substance of entirely animal
origin used as a building material. They spend the last few days of their puberty inside the hive
The Subtle Life of the Bee
can say that worker bees and drones develop inside ‘light cells’. The queen needs only 16 days after
her egg is laid to develop fully. A worker bee takes about 21 days, and thus, it may be deduced that
nature takes much more care in procreating the workers than the queen, while the male drones take
longer to mature, between 24 and 25 days.
In his cycle of lectures on The Bees, Rudolf Steiner provides an interesting picture of how the
cosmos is involved in this gestation. He explains,
The Sun turns on its axis once in twenty-one days. Then it will arrive again at this point and begin
repeating this movement. The worker uses from the Sun just what she needs to achieve its full development. If the worker were to continue in her development beyond this point, she would leave the
Sun development and come into the sphere of infuence that the Earth would exert upon her development. (…) The worker enters into Earth development and experiences it only as an already completely
developed animal, having achieved its full maturity at twenty-one days. (…) Now consider the drone.
It doesn’t “feel,” as I would put it, that it is completed at twenty-one days and wants to continue into
the Earth development phase before it is fnished maturing. It is defnitely an Earth animal, while the
worker is a Sun child, complete within herself. And what about the queen bee? She doesn’t even fnish
the entire Sun cycle of twenty-one days. She lags behind and remains forever a Sun child. (…) With
bees, you can really see what it means to be under the infuence of the Earth or of the Sun: depending upon whether a bee waits to complete the Sun development phase, it will turn out to be a queen, a
worker, or a drone.
Steiner (1998: 8–9)
So, based on Steiner’s intuition, the queen and worker bees are united by the same solar cycle. This
connection has been confrmed by the presence of the queen’s pheromones (Fontana, 2017), by
research on language and communication within the hive (von Frisch, 1976) and by the ability of
bees to process information and develop group strategies (Celli, 2008).
Being the only fertile female in the community, the queen is the mother of all the workers, comprising the future queens and sisters of the drones. Her ability to produce eggs is staggering, often
more than 1,500 per day, which is similar in total weight to that of her own body. The queen is very
different from the drones and the workers: her body is elongated, and her jaws are armed with sharp
teeth, whereas those of her daughters – the workers – are toothless. Also unlike the workers who,
when they sting, can no longer remove the serrated barb and die by being gutted, the queen has a
curved and smooth sting, which is used to destroy premature pretenders to the throne. She lacks
the ‘work tools’ supplied to the workers, such as the pollen baskets, the wax glands and the honey
bag. Unable to feed herself, her diet is exclusively based on the secretions of royal jelly from the
hypopharyngeal glands on the heads of the workers. Queen bees may live for up to 5 or even 7 years.
Worker bees are sterile because they are fed with royal jelly only for the frst 3 days and then
with nectar and honey. If the queen has enough space (in an enlarged and rounded cell) and if she
is fed with royal jelly, she develops her sexual organs. Therefore, as with other animals and partly
in humans, the environment and food to some extent determine the faculties of the subject and what
will be its external work.
Then, there is the drone. The drone is helpless and without a sting. Like the queen, it has no pollen baskets or wax glands and does not secrete royal jelly: its only function is to mate with the queen
and contribute modestly to the ventilation of the hive. It is also not able to feed itself, the workers
feed him. Worker bees are more numerous than drones, and, in a hive in a temperate climate region,
the number of workers varies between 8,000 and 15,000 in springtime and up to 80,000 in early
summer. For the frst 3 weeks of their life, they carry out tasks within the hive: in the frst 3 days –
during which they too are fed with royal jelly – they clean the cells. From days 5–14, they feed on
pollen while producing royal jelly to feed the queen bee and the newborn worker bees. From days
10–16, they are ‘wax bees’, and with their epidermal glands positioned on the abdomen between the
sternites (hard plates forming the sternum), they produce wax, a fatty substance of entirely animal
origin used as a building material. They spend the last few days of their puberty inside the hive