Queens Only Have Sex Once in their Life Her lifespan typically depends on how many males she mates with. A queen mates only once in her life and stores the sperm she collects in a special organ which she draws from to lay eggs for the rest of her life. Queens mate in the air with as many drones as possible.
She can take multiple mating flights and mated with several males – on average 12-15. Increasing the genetic diversity of the colony is important for colony productivity and disease resistance.
Healthy, fertile queens are capable of laying eggs almost constantly. During peak season, a quality queen can lay over 3,000 eggs per day - that's more than her own body weight in eggs in a day!
The honeybee's hive has cells made of wax. This is where the queen bee lays her eggs. She can lay 1500 eggs in one day.
The queen uses only a few of these sperm at a time in order to fertilize eggs throughout her life. If a queen runs out of sperm in her lifetime, new generations of queens will mate and produce their own colonies.
Honeybee queens are efficient sperm storers that initially store around 6 million sperm for up to 7 years, giving them an estimated potential to sire up to 1.7 million offspring (see [29] for a review on the honeybee mating system).
A colony of honeybees only has one queen. If there is more than one, they will fight to the death. The queen is the only bee in the hive that can lay eggs and is the mother of all the other bees.
Queens take the shortest time to develop (16 days) and have the longest lifespan. Queens live on average 1–2 years (Page and Peng 2001), although a maximum lifespan of 8 years was reported in one study (Bozina 1961).
The Queen Lays the Egg
For a queen bee, it's around 24 days. During the laying season (late spring to summer) the Queen bee is capable of laying over 1500 eggs per day.
In order to be ensure the future survival of honey bees, the honey bee queen must mate with drones, so that she can lay eggs from which new female workers and queens can be raised. To do this, the queen leaves the nest or hive and embarks on a 'mating flight' to meet with potential drones.
Orit Peleg, an assistant professor of computer science at Boulder, said that worker bees in a hive (the vast majority of bees) have to know where the queen is at all times because she is the sole source of eggs that keep the hive populated.
Once she has mated, she flies back to the hive to assume her royal role...and beekeepers now call her a mated queen. It will take her a few days to start laying eggs, during which her abdomen grows larger, making flight clumsy and difficult. She will now stay exclusively inside the hive.
A virgin queen bee will never mate inside of her own hive as she needs to take flight to mate. By mating during flight, a queen bee is able to increase the odds that she will mate with drones that did not originate from her own colony, and thereby minimize the chances of inbreeding appearing in the next generation.
A virgin queen honeybee (Apis mellifera) is sexually mature five or six days after emergence from her cell. About this time worker bees give her increased attention, and one or two days later mating flights are taken.
The queens can also theoretically fly about the same distance when looking for drones. In theory, that means that a drone can potentially mate with a queen that is 6 miles away! In actuality, however, on average, most mating flights occur within a mile of the virgin queen's home colony.
How do bees choose their next queen? First, the queen lays more eggs. Then, the worker bees choose up to twenty of the fertilized eggs, seemingly at random, to be potential new queens. When these eggs hatch, the workers feed the larvae a special food called royal jelly.
The drones from neighboring beehives will collect in swarms in the sky about 200 to 300 feet in the air. The queen sets out for her mating flight and the drone swarm finds her. The drones use their large eyes to spot the queen. The queen will mate with several drones, around 10 to 20.
Females do all the pollen foraging, honey producing, and defend the hive. Since only the queen can produce females, the colony cannot survive without her. The sterile worker females can lay eggs, but they can't mate with the male drones, and unfertilized eggs yield only males.
She's on a strict diet of royal jelly. This jelly is chock-full of nutrients that help the queen continue to lay healthy eggs. A queen cannot produce royal jelly on her own, the worker bees have to feed it to her. In fact, the queen couldn't survive on her own at all.
Honeybees sleep between 5 & 8 hours a day. More rest at night when darkness prevents them going out to collect pollen & nectar.
Queens are raised from the same fertilised female eggs as workers bees. A newly hatched female larva is neither queen or worker caste. There are small differences in the composition of royal jelly fed to larvae destined to be a queen or a worker. The variation in diet starts from the time of larvae hatching.
There's no such thing as 'king bee' in bees.
Female worker bees and the queen bee have the same genes...and any female larva has the potential to be a queen.