Weisel (Queen)
Lexikon
The queen of a bee colony and the only fully developed female bee in it.
The queen of a bee colony and the only fully developed female bee in it.
During the brood season she lays well over a thousand eggs a day; figures from specialist sources range from about 1,200 to 1,500. She can live to four or five years of age, though in practice this age is rarely reached anymore, because laying performance and sperm reserves already decline after three to four years. With her pheromones she holds the colony together, suppressing the building of queen cells and the development of the workers' ovaries.
From this the everyday specialist terms are derived: a colony with a queen is queenright, one without is queenless. Queen cells are the cells in which a new queen grows.