What is the role of the queen bee?

The queen bee sits at the heart of the hive. She is the mother of every other bee and the glue that holds the colony together. Without a queen, the hive fails and the bees scatter.

But what makes the queen so special? Like members of a royal family, she is chosen before birth and raised in a unique egg cell on a special diet during her larval stage. When she matures, the queen mates several times, then spends the rest of her life laying eggs and never leaves the hive again.

Here is a look at the most fascinating bee in your hive.

The special case of the queen

The life of a queen begins in a special egg cell that hangs vertically, also called a queen cup. Worker bees build these cells when the old queen weakens, or when the colony grows too large for the hive and is about to swarm. Usually they build several queen cells, and the existing queen lays an egg in each one. If the old queen dies or leaves the hive unexpectedly, the workers find a fresh egg or a young larva and move it into a queen cell.

The royal diet

Once the eggs in the queen cells hatch, the larvae are fed a special diet until they mature. At first they are fed a fluid secreted by the glands of their sister bees, called royal jelly. Every larva in the hive receives some royal jelly, but future queens are fed an enormous amount of it, and that is what triggers the development of their unique body shape and functioning ovaries. In the last two days of the larval stage, queens are also fed honey, which contains hormones that help the body keep developing.

Animal instinct

When queen larvae emerge from their cells after 6 to 8 days of growth, the next stage is a fight to the death, not exactly royal behavior. The first larva to emerge usually kills the old queen, tears open other queen cells and stings the larvae inside them to death. Later, when she flies to mate, she may have to fight all the other queens that survived or came from other hives.

Taking flight

About a week after she emerges, the new queen leaves the hive for the first of several mating flights. She hovers in the air in a certain area and draws drones from other colonies. During the flight she mates with 10 to 20 drones. Most drones do not succeed in mating and return to the hive to die a few months later.

Bee reproduction

The mating process of bees is not exactly romantic. During mating, the male reproductive organ, the endophallus, enters the queen. When he pulls away, the organ is torn from his body and tears his abdomen open. As a result, he dies shortly after mating. After two or three mating flights, the queen has about 6 million sperm stored in a dedicated organ for keeping sperm, and it is used to fertilize all of her eggs.

Laying eggs forever

After several mating flights the queen returns to the hive and stays inside until the end of her life, unless the colony becomes too large and she leaves with a swarm. Inside the hive she eats royal jelly and honey and spends most of her time laying eggs. A healthy queen lays about 1000 to 1500 eggs a day, roughly 200,000 eggs a year. Worker bees feed her continuously, remove her waste and spread her hormones throughout the hive to prevent new queen cells from being raised.

The queen controls the population of the hive: she lays fertilized female eggs and unfertilized male ones. The smaller females that hatch are worker bees, who gather honey and guard the hive, while the larger males are drones.

An end and a beginning

An average queen bee lives between two and five years. During that time, if the colony becomes too large, she may leave with about half of the population to find a new hive. Otherwise, she will begin to weaken and lay fewer eggs.

When the worker bees see signs of weakness in the queen, they move quickly to build new queen cups and the whole process begins again. If the queen is killed by mistake by a beekeeper or by disease, the hive will be in disorder until the workers raise another queen.

The life of a queen bee may not be glamorous, but it is essential to the health and welfare of the hive. That is why it matters to check on your queen often and to replace her if your colony does not do it on its own.

Want to know more about the role of the queen? Talk to us.