What determines if a queen bee produces another queen bee or just drone/worker bees? When a queen produces a queen, is there some kind of turf war until one of them leaves?
In: Biology
The workers feed a special food to the larvae and it turns into a queen. The new queen then takes her mating flight, and then finds a place to live. If she’s a replacement, she comes back to the hive, otherwise she (and some of the colony) swarms (flies as a group) to found a new colony.
As far as I know, in the domesticated/feral honeybee hive, the queen doesn’t dictate when to make a new queen, the workers do. They make a queen cell in which the queen will lay an egg. Or if the queen has died, they can use an egg in a regular cell to make a new queen. Any egg the queen lays could become a queen, it’s that a future queen is only fed royal jelly, and not the fermented pollen called “bee bread.” Being fed bee bread causes the ovaries to shrink and die, making a sterile worker. Being fed exclusively royal jelly makes the bee develop into a queen.
I think the only thing the queen has a choice in, is to lay male drones or not, but hopefully someone else knows how that’s done. Because unfortunately I don’t.
As for queens, there can only be one queen, so either the old queen and a majority of the workers will leave in a swarm if the old hive is over crowded. Leaving the new queen with the old hive. Or they will fight and the survivor will stay. Or sometimes the workers will mob the queen they don’t like and kill her.
It’s a mistake to think the queen is in charge. She is the focus of reproduction, but the workers decide when to produce a new one. If there are two at once they fight or one swarms off with some of the workers. The special food is called Royal Jelly, and it turns a normal egg into a queen.
Love bees, any advice on how to attract them to my garden as pollinators? Humming birds are great and butterflies are pretty good about making rounds, but bees are the #1 pollinators.
Main thing have been already said (tldr: between worker and queen the only difference is the diet). Two others things:
* The eggs which will become queens are laid in special cells, the queen cells. This cells are much more bigger than the normal cells, they have a different shape and they hang on the frame. But if a queen die and there is no queen cells the worker will make one from a normal cell in which there is a larva, and they’ll change its diet.
* The queen can chose if fertilize an egg or not: she has a sack full of sperm that put the sperm in the duct where the egg pass. But how does she decide if she has to fertilize an egg or not? It depends on the diameter of the normal cells in which she’s laying: in cells that are slightly bigger than normal she lays drone egg, in the other cells she lays worker
Additional interesting fact:
If a drone manages to mate with a queen, he leaves his back end in the queen mid-flight, falls off and dies in act of love-making.
If he survives, the worker bees will kick him out of the hive in the winter because he does no work and takes up precious food.
It’s a tough life for a drone!
Most of the comments are pretty much spot on, but I’ll clarify a couple of things…
First, what determines a worker bee or drone is male or female… The queen can “choose” which sex to lay via fertilization… If the egg is fertilized then it’s female… If not, then it’s a drone. Interestingly enough, when a new queen mates, the male’s entire reproductive organ is essentially “ripped off” and stays inside the queen… Several males can mate with a queen during her mating flight, and all of the sperm stays inside her. When she lays an egg she can control rather it gets fertilized or not.
As for worker bee or queen be. There are special “cells” that are much larger than normal. These are usually produced either as swarm cells (the colony’s way of reproducing) or as supercedure cells (a replacement queen because the existing one is either sick, old and unable to continue producing much longer, or sometimes just in case something happens to her. A fertilized egg (within the first 3 days I think, but don’t quote me on that) can be moved by the nurse bees into a supercedure cell to make a new queen if the old one dies… It’s basically the “disaster recovery” process of the bees.
When an egg is placed into a queen cell it is filled with royal jelly and sealed off. Unlike the normal workers where the cell is left open, and the larvae can be fed mostly bee bread (ferminted pollen) and some royal jelly. The queen larvae ONLY eats the royal jelly, and grows to to adulthood staying contained within it’s cell.
If this is done to do a swarm, then several queen cells are prepped and loaded, and then about half the workers fly off with the queen and they go find a new place to colonize. Back in the old colony, once a queen emerges from a cell, it’s very first duty is to go kill all the other queens or queens that have not emerged yet. She’ll chew open the cells and kill them. If other queens have emerged they will “pipe” (making a loud screaming noise) that allow them to locate each other. They will then fight to the death until only one remains… Last woman standing becomes the new queen. Once that’s finished, she will THEN go fly on her mating flight… Mating with other drones from other colonies. Then she’ll come back to the hive, and unless there is a swarm, that’s the last time she’ll ever leave the colony, from that moment on she’ll live there and die there. Yes, that even means to relieve herself… Unlike other workers and drones who take “cleansing” flights where they relieve themselves, the queen has her own attendants that take the mess away for her. She spends her entire life laying one egg after another…
A little further note… Bees don’t “hibernate” during the winter. The first thing they do is kick out all the drones… Which then die in the cold… They aren’t allowed in the hive during the winter because frankly, they do nothing. They eat resources and fly on mating flights… That’s it… And since they don’t even need a fertile queen to be produced (even a normal worker can lay eggs that can become drones) they are quite expendable.
Instead, during the winter, usually any time the temperature is below about 55 degrees F, the bees will “cluster”. The queen gets surrounded by all the worker, and the entire cluester just moves through the hive (over the comb) eating honey for energy and “shivering” their wings to generate heat. This keeps them alive through the winter until the temperature comes back up to where they can fly again.
If at a time a hive has a queen but determines the colony cannot grow or expand, the colony will take eggs that have been laid and start feeding it “royal jelly” which triggers a development to turn a normal egg into a queen. As the larva turns to prepupa and pupa, the comb is drawn out to be larger. A colony will create multiple queens at once, incase one doesn’t make it through the process. When the new queens are about to hatch out, the older queen will take flight and take half of the colony of bees with her. If she isn’t there or dead, then the colony does nothing but wait for the new queens. The first queen that hatches will make a decision. She will either fly away, and split the colony…or she goes around and murders her sister queens before the hatch. If she decides to fly away…well the next queen that hatches will have the same chance to make this decision.
It is possibly for large colonies to dwindle in this process if each succeeding queen decides to leave and halves the population by splitting the colony.
It’s also very possible that even if a queen emerges, she says fuck it and never goes on a mating flight.
It’s also possible that after she murders her sisters, she goes on a mating flight and doesn’t come back. Maybe ends up as a birds snack. And if there was no eggs left over to feed royal jelly, well that colony is now fucked. So beekeepers have to be vigilant to always make sure they find eggs when they inspect. If they cant see any eggs, they have reason to worry and must bring a frame of eggs into that hive from a neighboring hive, or purchase a queen from another beekeeping outfit.
Queens and live bees can be shipped through the USPS. And that’s an important reason you should definitely be worried about the USPS going under, because without them beekeeping and transporting these amazing pollinators would be much more harder and costlier to do.
Fun fact about bees..they’re a perfect democracy.
They vote for the best place to swarm to by scouting the neighborhood. A bee finds a candidate location and flies back to the hive. Starts dancing to indicate where to find the new location. How long the bee keeps dancing is an indicator of how good a location the bee thinks it has found.
While it’s carrying on about “hey guys, check out this spot…it’s really great..” other bees fly off to check the spot. They come back and do the dance as well. Again, they’re voting on how strongly they feel about the new digs by how long they keep the dance going. If it’s a really great spot, the returning bees get back in time to join the original dancer and so pretty soon you have a mosh pit of bees all dancing the same. A lousy spot doesn’t get enough bees all dancing at the same time because the earlier bees have peeled off and are out checking other locations that other scouts have found.
When enough bees are dancing the same song, they fly off and establish the new site.
The thing is, a bee has to check out the digs to dance the dance. You don’t get bee parties trying to sway the vote. Each bee has seen the spot they’re voting for and dances accordingly.
This thread is fascinating.
Who has a good recommendation for book that’s a layman’s intro to the world of bee colonies and all this?
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