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
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.
The queen does not choose to produce another queen, the worker bees decide that.
A queen bee has one job, and that is to lay eggs. She can choose to lay a fertilized egg or an unfertilized egg. She holds sperm in a separate sac and can release sperm as the egg passes it. Sometimes she will choose to lay an unfertilized egg. Unfertilized eggs are male, they are called drones. That’s right, boy bees do not have a daddy, and they only carry the queen’s DNA. For this reason, drones generally do not mate with their own queen… but sometimes mistakes happen!
Fertilized eggs are female and have the potential to become a queen or a worker. Queen bees and worker bees are genetically exactly the same. The difference happens in the first few days of life as an egg.
One of the worker bees main jobs is to take care of the eggs and larvae. They feed them and take care of them, like little nurses, and they are called nurse bees. All eggs are fed Royal Jelly for the first 3 days. Royal Jelly is the best bee food and is highest in nutrition, it comes from a gland in the nurse bee’s head! After 3 days, the egg hatches into a larva and the workers then feed it bee bread which is a mixture of honey, pollen and bee saliva. That larva will grow into a female bee, a worker bee.
Sometimes the worker bees decide that their hive needs a new queen. This can happen because their current queen is getting old, or she has died, or left the hive for various reasons. If the workers have decided that they need a new queen, some workers will create a special cell for a queen larvae and a worker bee will carefully move an egg to this cell. That cell is partially filled with royal jelly (much more than what an egg usually gets) and closed up. The egg inside will hatch after 3 days and will only have the royal jelly to consume. This super highly nutritious food helps the bee develop fully, particularly her reproductive organs, and she will grow into a queen.
After about 13 days (16 days total since she was laid as an egg), she will emerge from her cell as a fully formed adult queen bee. If there is another queen cell with a developing queen in the hive, she will first go and sting through the cell killing the developing queen inside. If a queen has already hatched, the two queens will fight to the death. One queen will survive and is the new queen bee!
Her next job will be to leave the hive for her “mating flight” where she will go to a “drone congregation area”. Drones from many different hives from miles around will be there waiting for a queen. She may mate with 10-15 drones before flying back to her hive. After successfully mating, she will have all the sperm she ever needs and she will soon begin laying eggs. She can lay up to 2000 eggs every day for 2-5 years. When she gets old, or if she leaves the hive, or if any other problem happens, the workers will replace her starting the process all over again. The workers decide everything in the hive!
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?
The workers are the ones who produce a new queen, not the queen bee. She just lays an egg and they make it into a queen.
They only do it for three reasons. They dont have a queen anymore because she died (was crushed on accident), the current queen is old, not laying well, and needs to be replaced, or they are preparing a 2nd queen to swarm and make a new hive somewhere else.
If its the first its not a problem. If its the second they just kill the old queen and toss her out. If its the third occassionally the current queen and the new one will duke it out but most of the time she leaves with her life.
Sometimes, if they make several queens just in case and they hatch out close to one another they will fight one another. Usually, if one queen hatches out early, she can smell the other queens and will kill them before they hatch.
Nature is brutal.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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