The Bee Bench › Brood Cycle & Queen Dial

⏱️ Brood Cycle & Queen Dial

Three days an egg, then it depends entirely on what she laid it in. Set a date and the dial reads off every milestone — the same thing the cardboard wheel does, without hunting for it in the truck.

Counting from

Date

Drag the dial to spin it a day at a time, or use the arrow keys when it's focused. Grey means the date has already passed.

How long each caste takes

Stage	Queen	Worker	Drone
Egg	3 days	3 days	3 days
Larva (open, being fed)	5½ days	6 days	6½ days
Cell capped on day	8	9	10
Pupa (capped)	7½ days	12 days	14½ days
Emerges on day	16	21	24
Mature / working	Mating flights day 20–24, laying by about day 25	Nurse bee from day 1, forager from about day 21 of adult life	Sexually mature about 14 days after emerging — day 38
Fed royal jelly	The whole larval stage	First 3 days only	First 3 days only
Cell	Peanut, hangs vertically	Flat tan capping	Domed, bullet-shaped capping

The whole queen trick is in the feeding. A queen and a worker start as the exact same egg. The difference is that a queen larva is fed royal jelly for her entire larval life while a worker gets it for three days and then bee bread. That's it — that's the whole thing. It's also why a colony can only raise a decent emergency queen from a larva under about three days old, and why you'll get a runt if all they had to work with was older brood.

Numbers you can use in an inspection. Eggs mean she was alive and here within three days. Capped worker brood means that egg went in nine days ago at the earliest. A capped queen cell means a virgin is out in about eight days — which is also roughly when a colony that has swarmed will have thrown its afterswarm. And if you found a colony with no eggs but capped queen cells, the old queen has already left.

Split & queen timeline → Queen marking colors →