Even if you’ve watched documentaries about honeybees, you may know little of their remarkable life within the hive.

A queen will lay a million eggs in her 5-year lifetime, which she places in wax brood cells.

Fertilized eggs grow into sterile female workers. Unfertilized eggs become male drones.

When the queen gets old, nurse bees bathe regular female larvae in royal jelly, which turns them into queen larvae. The queen that emerges first will kill the other larvae to become sole heir to the throne.

Her first duty is to fly away and mate with up to a dozen drones, to ensure genetic diversity. She’ll store their sperm in her abdomen for the rest of her life, to fertilize eggs.

When she returns to the hive, she takes the place of the old queen.

Worker bees go through an apprenticeship of sorts. Their first job is to clean the nursery. Once they develop the glands that produce royal jelly, they become nurse bees, feeding and caring for larvae. When they develop wax glands, they become engineers, building and repairing the hive.

Finally, they graduate to gathering nectar, and that’s when the work really begins.

A field bee never sleeps and will work herself to death flying hundreds of miles in a thousand trips to and from the hive, carrying the precious cargo that will sustain the colony.

We’ll have more on the fascinating process of how bees make honey—and how essential they are to our lives—on future EarthDates.