The Queen Bee: Her life and contribution to the bee hive
The queen bee is said to be the mother of every bee in the hive. A bee colony is a honey machine and every bee has a job to do. But the most important role is played by the queen. Let’s find out more about this queen bee and her relationship with her bees and the hive.
How many queens are there in a hive?
Any female larva can be a queen bee but there is only one queen in every hive. They have the same genes, but the difference is the queen’s diet.
After the queen is born and she emerges out of her queen cell, she instantly kills other larvae or the virgin bees. If there are two virgin bees, they both battle each other, and only one survives.
The birth of the queen bee:
A beehive cannot survive without a queen bee because she is the only one who can lay eggs. When a beehive needs a queen bee, the nurse bees select some female larvae and start feeding them an exclusive diet of royal jelly.
Royal jelly is super nutritious for the larvae to produce their reproductive system. This milky white secretion from the tops of the heads of young worker bees is rich in protein. Queen larvae are fed on the royal jelly till capping. The bees cap the cell when the larva is ready to pupate. And then the larva transforms itself into a queen bee.
The life of the queen:
After battling with the other potential queens and killing them, the queen takes the mating flight. Queen attends only one mating flight where she mates with the male drones. From this mating, she can lay fertilized eggs for the next 3-5 years. After mating, she comes back to the hive considering herself the queen of the hive. If there is still old queen bee, she kills her and takes the charge of laying eggs.
The queen bee is always surrounded by her attendant bees. The queen bee doesn’t do anything for herself so she can only focus on laying eggs for the colony. She has this one job of laying eggs because the attendant bees clean her, feed her and take care of her needs. The Queen bee looks at the bottom of every comb cell to find empty cells. And when she finds it, she lays eggs in it by dropping her abdomen into it.
A queen bee can live up to 3 to 5 years. She can lay 2000-3000 eggs in a day! In case, if the hive is dying, the queen bee is the last to die. The worker bees always protect their queen and her pheromone by which she tells the hive that she is alive and doing well.
Last days of the queen bee:
In the last days of her life, she can’t produce eggs so she prepares to leave the hive. Also, the queen pheromone that she gives off gets decreased. This is the alarm for the worker bees and they start raising new female larvae, which will turn into queens.
The queen is replaced in some cases such as when there is not enough space in the beehive. At this time, the old queen leaves the hive with half of the worker bees to make a new hive. And the bees in the old hive live with their new queen.
The hive also gets a new queen , when the old queen dies unexpectedly or the queen bee is old and can’t lay eggs. The new queen stings the old queen to death for the survival of the honey beehive.
In the end, we can only say that the relationship between a queen bee and her colony is the driving force behind the beehive and honey.
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