Resume: Colony organization, foraging, broodnest.
The population of a honey bee colony in a good summer can include up to 75 000 individuals, approximately 64% adult bees and 36% brood. The brood consists of eggs (5% of the total colony population), larvae (10%) and pupae (21%), estimated from Bodenheimer (1937) and Fukuda (1983). Seeley (1982) mentioned that bees in the youngest age class (0– 2 days) are associated with brood production by cleaning the empty brood cells to prepare the cells for reuse. The next older age class associated with brood production is the class of nurse bees. These bees feed the larvae massively, as larvae need a constant supply of nutrients. According to Haydak (1963a), nurse bees typically are from 5 to 16 days old.
   Experiments showed that in a single night up to 16% of all bees received proteins from 100 nurses injected with 14C labeled phenylalanine, and that up to 25% of the marked phenylalanine went to adult worker bees, mainly to foragers.  Homecoming foragers hand their nectar load over to storage bees, a group of middle aged bees (12–18 days old; see Seeley, 1989) which transport the nectar to available empty cells and process it afterwards into honey. 
    Pollen directly fed to the brood constitutes only approximately 5% of all protein-containing brood feedings (Babendreier et al., 2004, in press). Harbo (1993) calculated the overall investment into brood nursing using honey as the currency: He found that bees used 121 g of honey (that is, the energy stored in this amount of honey) to raise one thousand adults from an age-mixed brood comb, and about 163 mg of honey to rear one egg to the pupal stage. 
   Another important factor is the ratio of nurses to larvae: Eischen et al. (1982, 1983) established several colonies with different worker-larvae-ratios. A higher worker-to-larvae ratio led to lower pollen consumption per worker and to a higher life-span of the offspring. Surprisingly, colonies with higher “workload” per nurse showed a better brood rearing efficiency than bigger colonies with lower workload per nurse, which was also shown by Harbo (1986). 

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