Life inside the hive: The queen bee

Have you ever heard someone being referred to as the "queen bee"? Back in high school, we had one: Linda. Linda was pretty popular and ran her social circle, which shaped other social circles. Fortunately, Linda's similarity to a queen honey bee ended there. Welcome back to learning about the fascinating life cycle of the honey bee hive.

The queen honey bee is the most important member of a honey bee hive. She is responsible for laying eggs and ensuring the survival of the colony. The life of a queen bee is an extraordinary process that begins with the emergence of a new queen and ends with her death or replacement.

The queen is produced from a special peanut-shaped cell in the hive called a queen cell. These cells are larger than regular worker bee or drone cells and are specially constructed to accommodate the growing queen. Worker bees will only further build up the queen cell once the reigning queen has laid an egg in it. In three days, the egg hatches into a larva.

After hatching, all larvae are fed a special diet called royal jelly by young worker bees, who produce it from glands in their heads. Royal jelly is a highly nutritious substance that contains proteins, vitamins, and hormones that stimulate growth and development.

While worker and drone bees are only fed royal jelly for three days after they hatch, the queen is different. She is only fed royal jelly throughout her entire larval stage.

On the sixth day, the queen cell is capped with wax while she continues to feed, grow, and develop within. The time from when the queen egg is laid until she's an emerged adult is fairly predictable: sixteen days.

When the new queen emerges, the first thing she does is seek out and kill any other developing queens in the hive with her non-barbed stinger to eliminate competition. She will then take orientations and cleansing flights. A queen will be ready to mate a week from emergence, and mating flights will last several days. She will fly up to a mile from the hive to a Drone Congregation Area, where she will mate with fourteen to twenty drones.

Once mated, the queen does nothing other than lay eggs and emit queen pheromones, a smell signal letting the hive know it is "queenright" or has a laying queen, and all is A-OK. She can lay up to two thousand eggs per day during the peak season, her entire body weight. She is constantly surrounded and attended by special worker bees, known as her "retinue," who feed her, groom her and remove her waste.

The queen can also determine the gender of her eggs by only depositing sperm with her eggs to make female worker bees. All of her other unfertilized eggs become Drones.

A healthy queen can live for an average of five years, which is very impressive for an insect! However, when the queen bee becomes weak or old and reduces her production of queen pheromone, the colony will start to create queen cells to raise a new queen. The process of the hive workers replacing the queen is called supersedure. Once a new queen is produced, the old queen will leave the colony with a group of worker bees to start a new colony elsewhere. And the circle of the hive's life begins again.

Thinking back to Linda from high school, she did have her retinue, and everyone knew she was the queen bee, but I’m very glad she didn't have a stinger.