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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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!
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