Do bees have the same probability of being male or female? What decides if a bee larvae will become a queen? Do they grow up and start a new hive?
In: Biology
Lets start with the fun part: sex
A young queen bee has sex once in her life. She takes a maiden flight, finds some male bees up in the sky and has an orgy up there. She will store the sperm of multiple male partners in her for the rest of her life.
When a queen bee lays an egg she can choose wether she fertilizes that egg. Unfertilized eggs always become males. They are DNA clones of the queen. They are pretty useless, they only eat and if they are lucky get to have sex once.
Fertilized eggs become female. The hive “choose” if they need a new queen. If they feed a female queen jelly during the larval state you get a queen. If not you get a worker bee.
Usually you will get a few queens every year, the new ones will fight and kill eachother. The survival will take a few hundred or thousand of her mothers bees with her and find a new place for a hive.
The mother continues until her sperm runs out and then stops being able to make new females. I’m not sure if in nature the hive would replace the old queen, an experienced beekeeper would.
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