Honey bee Apis mellifera

The western honey bee is managed as a colony rather than as an individual, and that single fact reorganises its veterinary medicine. A hive holds one laying queen, two thousand to sixty thousand workers and up to five hundred seasonal drones; caste follows from larval diet, royal-jelly-fed larvae becoming queens. Brood emerges sixteen days from the egg in queens, twenty-one in workers and twenty-four in drones. Queens live one to two years and lay fifteen hundred to two thousand eggs a day, while summer workers last only a few weeks. Diagnosis and treatment therefore take the colony as the patient: samples are pooled from roughly three hundred adult bees and infestation is judged against a threshold, not a case. Varroa destructor, in the United States since 1987, is the dominant problem, carrying deformed wing and paralysis viruses; national testing of symptomatic colonies found mites in eighty-five percent of them, and untreated colonies usually die within three to four years. Because bees make food, medication is timed around the nectar flow, antibiotics and fumagillin being withheld before and during it to keep residues out of honey.