Queen
Lexikon
The queen is the only fully developed female in the colony.
The queen is the only fully developed female in the colony. The egg alone does not reveal whether a queen or a worker will develop from it: both come from fertilized eggs. That is decided only by the feeding given by the nurse bees. A larva in an elongated queen cell receives royal jelly exclusively throughout the whole larval period, a secretion from the hypopharyngeal and mandibular glands. Its development takes a total of 16 days, making it shorter than for the worker bee and the drone.
About a week after emerging, the young queen flies out on her mating flight. At drone congregation areas she meets many unrelated drones and mates with several of them; typical figures range from about ten to twenty. Part of the sperm transferred is stored in her spermatheca and usually lasts for her whole life, which can last several years. Figures of two to five years are common. At egg-laying it is decided whether she releases sperm: in worker cells she lays fertilized eggs, in the larger drone cells unfertilized ones.
Her main task is egg-laying. She is constantly attended by a changing retinue of young worker bees, who feed her with brood food several times an hour. At the same time she releases pheromones that attract the workers, inhibit the development of their ovaries, and hold the colony together as a unit.
For work on the colony, the brood pattern is more important than finding the queen herself. If eggs and larvae of all stages are found in a solid brood nest, a laying queen is present, even if she is not seen. If the distribution of her pheromone weakens as the colony grows, the workers build queen cells, and the colony goes into swarming mood.