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.
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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