08/08/2026
A special follower from Australia inquired about the name of the process where honey bees change their tasks and roles as they age. It is called temporal polyethism (sometimes referred to as age polyethism).
Here is a quick breakdown of how that progression typically looks:
🐝 Younger bees (Days 1–20): Start out as cleaners, move on to nursing the brood, tending to the queen, handling wax production, and guarding the hive entrance.
🐝 Older bees (Day 21 onward): Transition into forager bees, leaving the hive to collect nectar, pollen, water, and propolis until the end of their lifecycle.
As we touched on yesterday, honey bees are remarkably adaptable. While the transition from nurse to forager usually moves in one direction as bees age, the process is flexible—known as behavioral plasticity.
Bee Haven 2026
For example, if a colony experiences a shortage of nurse bees—due to a disease outbreak, a sudden surge in brood, or even the stress of a box being added too soon (which pulls extra nurse bees away from the brood nest just to help heat excess empty space)—older bees and foragers can actually regress back to nursing duties.
While the forager bee's hypopharyngeal glands might not be fully functional anymore, she can still step up, reactivate those glands to a degree, and assist with the care to support the colony when it's in a pinch.
