Understanding how organisms such as Africanized honey bees spread so quickly is of fundamental importance for reasons ranging from the ecological to the financial. Africanized honey bees’ ability to spread rapidly is partly due to increased individual growth rate, yet the mechanisms by which this is achieved remain poorly understood. Work in limnology led to the proposal of a ‘growth rate hypothesis’ which predicts fast-growing organisms will have higher phosphorus contents due to the increased need for phosphorus-rich ribosomal RNA to construct proteins. To test this hypothesis in honey bees, we compared the phosphorus content of age-matched European and Africanized honey bee larvae and adults. We show that Africanized honey bees have higher phosphorus contents than European bees at each life stage we have examined, except for the egg stage. However, the change in phosphorus levels between different life stages is far greater than the difference between Africanized and European bees within a life stage. These data suggests that phosphorus-rich ribosomal RNA may be part of the mechanism for increasing growth rate both in Africanized honey bees and in different life stages of all honey bees.