Finest Queen Honey
The DNA of the Queen Honey Bee is remarkably similar to that of hundreds of other female worker bees in the colony.
Her nutrition, not her genetics, is what sets her apart. All of the larvae in the hive, male and female, are fed royal jelly, a milk-like liquid secreted by nurse bees. But although a worker bee only eats royal jelly for the first two days of her life, the queen consumes it throughout the duration of her growth.
The queen has the shortest time to mature into an adult—16 days for queens, 21 days for workers, and 24 days for drones—despite being the biggest of the three castes.
In the meanwhile, the nurse Like the rest of the brood, she is taken care of and nurtured by bees. During the larval stage, the queen swiftly outgrows her comb cell due to her unique nutrition. In response, laborers construct what is known as a queen cell, a unique peanut-shaped cell. In the hive, they are the biggest and most identifiable cells.
If you have raised bees for any length of time, you have undoubtedly seen little cups known as queen cups protruding from the comb. Typically, a colony stores many queen cups as backup, particularly during the spring when swarming becomes more likely. Given that the majority of queen cups do not contain eggs, beekeepers should not automatically become alarmed by them.
Thanks to the work of the nursing bees, an egg placed within a queen cup eventually grows into a much bigger queen cell. The queen develops in the queen cell from the larval to the pupal stages, emerging as an adult on the sixteenth day.
Despite having a queen, bees are more democratic than despotic. That’s sort of British of them.
One of three factors will influence a colony’s decision to remove a queen:
The first queen has passed away.
The original queen is either less prolific overall or has injuries.
The colony is expanding quickly and is ready to swarm.
The unique pheromone that the queen produces lets the colony know how healthy and productive she is. Workers recognize when it’s time to raise a new queen when the pheromone strength drops. This might be due to the queen being older and less productive, or it could be because there isn’t enough room for her to lay eggs. (Maybe as a result of their beekeeper not using a foundation for the brood chamber that had more cells). However, we’re getting off topic.)
The colony’s sole option is to swarm, or break up and find new homes for the original queen and half of the colony, if the hive is just too crowded and the original queen is still productive.
In this case, worker bees build queen cups and stop feeding the queen in preparation for the swarm. While the latter is meant to lighten the queen for her impending journey, the former establishes the framework for future queen cells.
Not long after the swarm departs, our new queen—shouldn’t we name her “princess” at this point?—is born. When this firstborn queen hatches, she must make a crucial choice: Gather additional bees depart the colony on a journey to establish a new kingdom (this second swarm is referred to as a “after swarm”), or they choose to stay in the hive and inherit the monarchy.
The Battle for the Throne
A new queen will more often choose to stay in the hive.
The drama really starts to heat up here. The new queen must eliminate any challenges to her reign as soon as she decides to remain. To do this, she searches out every other queen cell, chews through the cell, and uses her reusable stinger to kill her sisters.
When the victim tries to remove the worker bee’s barbed stinger, it ruptures her lower abdomen, killing her. The stinger of a queen bee, however, is unbarbed and multipurpose.
You could wonder, “What if two queens are born at the same time?”
It gets better: The two queens will engage in a death-defying battle in this scenario. Naturally, the winner becomes the new queen.
Senior Citizens
One of the most prolific insects on the planet is a good queen.
Her lifetime is 20 times longer than that of an average worker (2–3 years on average), and she can lay up to a million eggs before she passes away.
The colony notices a decrease in the queen’s pheromone activity as her production declines. This is their cue to start getting ready to bring up a new queen.
Thus, life goes on in a circle.
The queen bee is only thinking about the health of the entire colony, even though she is the hive’s regal. One of the amazing traits that set honey bees apart as extraordinary social beings from whom humans may learn a few things is their collective attitude.
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