How long can a worker bee live?

If a hive loses the queen suddenly the workers will be aware of this quite quickly (within a couple of hours) as the queen pheromone dissipates. They will repond to this by making emergency queen cells on the comb over recently-laid eggs or young larvae and will feed them with royal jelly. This will produce new queens to replace the old one.

If they are unable to do this because there are no eggs or larvae, or only drone eggs and larvae, the colony will die out as the current generation of workers dies. The average life span of a worker in summer is about six weeks.