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
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.
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.
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