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 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.
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