Queen Substance
Lexikon
Queen substance refers to the pheromone blend produced by the queen mainly in her mandibular glands.
Queen substance refers to the pheromone blend produced by the queen mainly in her mandibular glands. These glands sit in the head above the mandibles and are noticeably larger in the queen than in the worker bee or drone. The secretion is oily and odorless to humans. The retinue picks it up while licking and feeding the queen and passes it on to the other bees through food exchange and body contact, so that it spreads throughout the whole colony.
Its effect is that of a signaling substance. Queen substance shapes the shared hive scent and holds the colony together as a unit. It attracts the worker bees and at the same time inhibits the development of their ovaries. As long as enough of it circulates in the colony, the building of queen cells is also suppressed.
Two points are often misunderstood. First, queen substance is not a single scent compound but a blend, and the queen does not release pheromones only through her mandibular glands: the tergal gland pouches and the Koschevnikov gland are also involved. Second, the substance does not act like a switch, but through its concentration. What matters is how much reaches each individual bee.
This is exactly where the practical significance lies. If a colony becomes very large or the queen weakens, the pheromone becomes diluted within the colony. The workers then build queen cells, and the colony either swarms or undergoes silent supersedure. Timely expansion and relief of congestion has a preventive effect here. If the queen is lost, the signal disappears, and the colony raises emergency queen cells from the young brood available.