The young of bees and of drones is white, and from the young
come the grubs; and the grubs grow into bees and drones. The egg of
the king bee is reddish in colour, and its substance is about as
consistent as thick honey; and from the first it is about as big as
the bee that is produced from it. From the young of the king bee there
is no intermediate stage, it is said, of the grub, but the bee comes
at once.

Whenever the bee lays an egg in the comb there is always a
drop of honey set against it. The larva of the bee gets feet and wings
as soon as the cell has been stopped up with wax, and when it
arrives at its completed form it breaks its membrane and flies away.
It ejects excrement in the grub state, but not afterwards; that is,
not until it has got out of the encasing membrane, as we have
already described. If you remove the heads from off the larvae
before the coming of the wings, the bees will eat them up; and if
you nip off the wings from a drone and let it go, the bees will
spontaneously bite off the wings from off all the remaining drones.