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Honeybee queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees to become sexually mature. In each hive or colony, there is normally only one adult, mated queen, who is the mother of the bees of the hive, although there are exceptions.
Development
The queen develops more fully than sexually immature workers because she is given royal jelly, a secretion from glands on the heads of young workers, for an extended time. She develops in a specially-constructed queen cell, which is larger than the cells of normal brood comb, and is oriented vertically instead of horizontally.
| Type | Egg | Larva | Cell capped | Pupa | Developmental Period | Nuptial Flight(s) | Start of Fertility / Egg Laying |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Queen | 3 days | 5 1/2 days | 7 1/2 days | 8 days | 16 days | about 20 days | approx. 23 days |
The best queens emerge from replacement queen cells. As the young queen larva pupates with her head down, the workers cap the cell with beeswax. When ready to emerge, she will chew a circular cut around the cap of her cell. Often the cap swings open when most of the cut is made, so as to appear like a hinged lid. Queen cells that are opened on the side indicate that the virgin queen was likely killed by a rival.
When the young queens are ready to emerge, they often begin to "pipe", a shrill peeping, which is thought to be a challenge to other emerged or ready-to-emerge virgins. Unless the workers restrain them, emerged virgin queens will quickly find and kill rivals. During the swarm season, workers may separate young queens, thus keeping several alive at once for longer than a brief period. The extra queens may go with swarms or afterswarms to sort out their survival in a new home. The separation of virgin queens may also be an extra precaution for hive survival. In the time leading up to a swarm, the old queen will stop laying eggs several days before she leaves with the prime swarm. Usually, there are several maturing queen cells in the remaining hive. In case a virgin queen does not come back from a nuptial flight the bees may hold back a standby. A queenless hive with larvae older than 4 days is not able to create an emergency queen.
Reproduction
When one queen survives in a colony, she will go out on a sunny, warm day to mate with 12-15 drones. She has only a limited time to mate, and if she is unable to fly because of bad weather and remains unmated, she will become a "drone layer." Drone-laying queens usually mean the death of the colony, because the workers have no fertilized (female) larvae from which to raise a replacement. If there is a deficit of drones, or the weather provides too brief a window for full mating, the queen may be able to function briefly, laying fertilized eggs for a few weeks or months, until she runs out of sperm cells and ceases laying fertilized eggs much sooner than the normal 2-3 year life span of queens.
If workers realize their queen is failing, and the weather will allow a replacement to be raised and mated, the bees can "supersede" the queen. However, supersedure will fail in winter in colder climates, because there are no drones and the queens cannot fly to mate.
A special rare case of reproduction is thelytoky the reproduction of female workers or queens by laying worker bees. Thelytoky occurs in the Cape bee, Apis mellifera capensis and has been found in other strains at very low frequency.
Daily life for the queen
Although the name might imply it, a queen has no control over the hive. Her sole function is to serve as the reproducer; she is an "egg laying machine." A good queen of quality stock, well reared with good nutrition and well mated, can lay about 2,000 eggs per day during the spring build-up and live for two or more years. She lays her own weight in eggs every couple of hours and is continuously surrounded by young worker attendants, who meet her every need, giving her feed and disposing of her waste. They also lick her body for the pheromones called queen substance, that is needed to stop worker bees from laying eggs.
Because the social structure is so complex and fixed, a honeybee colony can be thought of as a single organism, and the individual bees as simply cells of the organism; they cannot survive on their own. The queen is responsible for the reproduction of the "cells", but also is responsible through her own pheromone production for the reproduction of the whole colony. This usually takes place in the spring and is called swarming.
Identification
| Color | Year ends in | |
| white | 1 or 6 | |
| yellow | 2 or 7 | |
| red | 3 or 8 | |
| green | 4 or 9 | |
| blue | 5 or 0 | |
The queen bee is noticeably longer than the worker honeybees surrounding her. Even so, in a hive of 60,000 to 80,000 honeybees, it is often difficult for beekeepers to find the queen with any speed; for this reason, many queens in non-feral colonies are marked with a light daub of paint on their thorax. The paint used does no harm to the queen and makes her much easier to find when necessary. Although the color is sometimes randomly chosen, professional queen breeders use a system whereby the color of a queen's dot indicates what year she hatched. This aids beekeepers who are deciding whether their queens are too old to maintain a strong hive and need replacing. Sometimes even a tiny plate marked with the identification number of the queen is used.
References
"Queen bee"