The Honey
Bee Queen
The honey bee queen is the only honey bee that is sexually developed. This is due to a special diet of royal jelly.
Royal jelly is a milky substance of digested honey and pollen, combined with a chemical secreted from a gland found in the nursing bee's head.There is normally only one adult, the mated honey bee queen, in a hive. She is the largest bee in the colony and the mother of all……..which is probably why us mum’s are known as “queen bees” and rightly so! However, a queen bee does not directly control the hive. Her sole function is to serve as the reproducer. Honey bee queens can lay up to 3,000 eggs on one day, around 5-6 per minute. More than her own bodyweight in eggs every day, quite a little production line! A queen is able to control the flow of sperm when fertilizing eggs. Unfertilized honey bee eggs develop into drones, male bees, and have a single set of chromosomes. While the queen has a stinger it is not barbed which means she can sting repeatedly without dying although she does not assist in defending the nest. Queens are raised in specially-constructed queen cells. The fully constructed queen cells have a peanut like shape and texture.
When a young virgin queen emerges from a queen cell, she will seek out virgin queen rivals and attempt to kill them.Virgin queens will quickly find and sting to death any other emerged virgin queen. Queen cells that are opened on the side indicate that a virgin queen was likely killed by a rival virgin queen. The surviving virgin queen will fly out on a sunny, warm day to a "drone congregation area" where she will mate with 12-15 drones. If the weather holds, she may return to the drone congregation area for several days until she is fully mated. She will selectively release sperm for the remaining 2-7 years of her life.
The young virgin queen has only a limited time to mate. If she is unable to fly for several days 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 worker bees or a replacement queen. The drones' sole job is to mate with the queen. Fertilized eggs develop into workers, or female bees, and have a full double set of chromosomes. In order to direct the other honey bees, the queen emits powerful pheromones. As the queen ages her pheromone output diminishes. The queen bee's abdomen is larger than the worker honey bees 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 are marked with a light daub of paint on their thorax (see above photo). 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 color which identifies the year a queen hatched, which helps them to decide whether their queens are too old to maintain a strong hive and need to be replaced. Sometimes tiny convex disks marked with identification numbers are used when a beekeeper has many queens born in the same year. All in all we must thank the queen bee for if it was not for her we could not enjoy the health benefits of honey.
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