Elizabeth I of England was also called the Virgin Queen. This article concerns bees.

In beekeeping, a virgin queen is a queen bee that has not mated with a drone.

Virgins are intermediate in size between workers and mated, laying queens, and are much more active than the latter. They are hard to spot while inspecting a frame, because they run across the comb, climbing over worker bees if necessary, and may even take flight if sufficiently disturbed. Virgin queens can often be found clinging to the walls or corners of a hive during inspections.

Virgin queens appear to have little queen pheromone and often do not appear to be recognized as queens by the workers. A virgin queen in her first few hours after emergence can be placed into the entrance of any queenless hive or nuc and acceptance is usually very good, whereas a mated queen is usually recognized as a stranger and runs a high risk of being killed by the older workers.

Virgins will quickly find and kill (by stinging) any other emerged virgin queen (or be dispatched themselves), as well as any unemerged queens. She locates them by piping. An empty queen cell will show whether the queen emerged normally (open on the tip) or whether it was torn down from the side and its queen killed by another.

When a colony is preparing to swarm, the workers may prevent virgins from fighting and one or several virgins may go with the swarm while other virgins stay behind with the remnant of the hive. As many as 21 virgin queens have been counted in a single large swarm. When the swarm settles into a new home, the virgins will then resume normal behavior and fight to the death until only one remains. The old queen will usually be allowed to live and continue laying, but within a couple weeks she will disappear and the former virgin, now mated, will take her place.

Bees