Sorry for the relative silence today. Today has been one of those days where I remember why I want to have a smallholding rather than doing the day job. But it's the best night of the week - not just that Brooklyn 99 is on, but because it's #beekeepershour from 9 @beekeepershour

The thing I've been promising to tell you is the most interesting thing about bees - their society and the queen

In a hive, there are three types of bee - queen, worker (girl) and drone (boy).

Most people think the queen is in charge but she's not. She has one job - egg laying - and once she's past it, she's replaced. Bees are actually classical Marxists, with the workers controlling what the queen lays, how much and when - I greet ours "Comrade General Secretary"

At this time of year, the queen will be laying 100s of eggs a day raising the population from 10,000 at the end of winter to 40,000+ by end of June. The workers are bringing in pollen which provides the proteins for the eggs to turn into bees.

The queen can actually decide what gender of bee to make. She chooses whether to fertilize the egg - fertilized for worker, not for drone. She has a spermatheca, which is filled on her initial mating flight at about 2 weeks old. This lasts her entire life - up to 5 years

She chooses based on the size of cell she's laying in - drone cells are bigger.

Queens are fed royal jelly for their entire gestation period unlike workers, which makes them bigger with enlarged ovaries for all the laying.

Workers are the majority of the colony. Their in jobs either as nurse bees, foragers or guard bees depending on their age. Over winter, they live for 6 months. In the summer, just 6 weeks. They literally work themselves to death, gathering nectar and pollen for the winter stores

Drones, far from being useless, have a very important role - mating with queens. During the queen's mating flight, she will mate with up to a dozen drones - the more sperm, the longer she lives.

This is why drones have much bigger eyes, to see the queen in the sky

At this time of year, drones will venture out finding virgin queen's which is why queen breeders will focus on producing lots of drones, for genetic diversity. They do this with drone foundation, slightly bigger than normal.

Sometimes, the queen will die before they have prepared to replace her. If this happens, you can get laying drones. Without the beekeeper's help replacing the queen, the colony will die as they can only unfertilized eggs - drones.

Drones also don't overwinter. Around September, you will see workers kicking out drones as they will be eating their food. And because they're from unfertilized eggs, they only have a mother

This is just an overview of the bee life, each of these tweets could be a 2 hour lecture in itself (and I may have made a couple of errors - apologies). But each type of bee has a specific and important role in the colony's health