The Queen Bee ~ Part Three of the Bee Series

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Typically the queen bee is an adult female, a mated honey bee who lives in the hive. She has fully developed reproductive organs. She is usually the mother of most, if not all, of the bees in the hive. The queen is developed from larvae selected by worker bees and is specially fed to become sexually mature. There is usually only one queen in a hive and she is fiercely protected. She is the star of the hive due to her egg-laying abilities. If you see a queen cup with an egg inside and white liquid this means that a cup has been acknowledged and preparations are being made to develop a future queen. Nurse bees begin drawing out the comb to about 25 millimeters to give the queen larvae room to grow. The cell will be covered with a layer of wax at about day 9 and it will take about 16 days for the queen to hatch. Workers feed the queen royal jelly and she is the only one who feeds on this substance. When her head peaks out the worker bees will help her chew her way out. The queen is the largest in the colony and she has wings that only make it halfway down her abdomen while the worker bees have wings fully covering their abdomens. The queen is about 20 mm in size and her most important anatomical characteristics are her female reproductive organs, such as the spermatheca, where she stores sperm that she collects during her mating flights. She will use this sperm for the rest of her life to lay fertilized eggs which will produce female bees. The worker bees stinger is barbed but the queens is smooth. She can string multiple times and survive where the workers can sting only once. Her stinger is also used during the laying of eggs, to position and fight other queen bees. Queen bees are usually docile and rarely sting beekeepers. Although beekeepers become more able to spot the queen over time, a queen is usually marked with a small dot on her thorax. Each year a certain color is used to designate which year she was born. When the hive becomes crowded the workers will stop feeding the queen. The queen is then lightened for the flight to relocate to a new hive. She will take off from the hive with about half of the colony and the queen has left the hive forever. The worker bees, the colony as a whole, decide when to swarm and the fate of the queen. The new queens that hatch will have a decision to make. They will either stay in the hive or swarm and, taking more of the colony, go and form a new hive. If there are two queens left in a hive they will fight to the death leaving only one. If there are queens not yet born the queen will use her stinger to kill the unborn in their cells. To mate, a queen will go on mating flights shortly after birth, attract drones to a congregation area. The drone who mates with a queen will die during the process since his appendage is ripped from his body. The queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day, with the fertilized eggs becoming workers or queens and unfertilized eggs becoming drones.