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
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.
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.
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