The
The Queen Bee
She lays all the eggs (about 1,500 per day!) and only leaves the hive once in her life in order to mate. Becoming the queen bee is a matter of luck.
Queens are the only specimens capable of reproducing. Their only job is to lay large numbers of eggs per day throughout their lifespan. Each queen bee can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day!
Drones ensure future generations of honey bee colonies by mating with the queens. But given that the workers are females, you may be wondering whether worker bees can lay eggs. The short answer is: Worker bees are able to lay eggs.
A bee becomes a queen bee thanks to the efforts of the existing worker bees in the hive. A young larva (newly hatched baby insect) is fed special food called "royal jelly" by the worker bees. Royal jelly is richer than the food given to worker larvae, and is necessary for the larva to develop into a fertile queen bee.
When a queen bee dies the worker bees will become agitated and more aggressive with no direction from their monarch. Because of the lack of a queen substance pheromone, worker bees will begin to lay eggs. As worker bees are unable to fertilize eggs the hive begins to produce too many male drones.
Older worker bees will reject queens that they are not familiar with and tend to view them as a colony invader, even when they have no hope of raising a new queen on their own. This is especially true if the queen is unmated, or not well-mated, with numerous drones from unrelated colonies.
Different species of honey bees cannot successfully mate with each other. Although exceptions exist in the animal world, the ability to mate and produce viable offspring is what defines a species.
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.
However, one isolated population of honeybees living in the southern Cape of Africa has evolved a strategy to do without males. In the Cape bee, female worker bees are able to reproduce asexually: they lay eggs that are essentially fertilised by their own DNA, which develop into new worker bees.
There's no such thing as 'king bee' in bees.
Early on, all bee larvae are fed a substance called royal jelly, which is a gelatinous substance produced in the head glands of 'nurse' bees. Royal jelly is composed of approximately two-thirds water, one-eighth proteins, 11 per cent simple sugars, small quantities of Vitamin C and various trace minerals and enzymes.
Abstract. Worker honeybees (Apis mellifera) usually only lay eggs when their colony is queenless. However, an extremely rare 'anarchistic' phenotype occurs, in which workers develop functional ovaries and lay large numbers of haploid eggs which develop into adult drones despite the presence of the queen.
Of the 60,000 bees in a hive, almost 99% of them are female! Female honey bees, or worker bees, make all of the decisions in the hive and do all of the work. There are a couple hundred male bees in a hive, but they don't do much but sit around and eat food. They don't even clean up after themselves!
Worker bees are generally unable to mate, but are capable of laying unfertilized eggs which can develop into male offspring. To assure dominance over reproduction the Queen often selectively eats any worker laid eggs.
However, there can (typically) only be one queen bee in a hive, so when the new queens hatch they must kill their competitors. A newly hatched queen will sting her unhatched rivals, killing them while they are still in their cells. If two queens hatch at once, they must fight to the death.
In all seriousness though, if the queen is rejected, she will die. According to School of Bees, workers who see the queen as an invader will form a ball around her and sting her until she is dead.
The Process of Telling the Bees
According to Chapple, to inform the honey bee hives of their new master, "you knock on each hive and say, 'The mistress is dead, but don't you go. Your master will be a good master to you.
Most beekeepers know that a hive only contains a single queen. However, this isn't necessarily always true. There are times when a colony may have two queens; and while it's usually short-lived, the scenario probably happens more often than most beekeepers realize.
Drones don't necessarily mate with their own queen, but instead, they gather outside the hive with other drones from neighboring colonies. It's like a mating meeting place. Drones collect in mating swarms up to a mile away from the hive. They swarm about 200 to 300 feet in the air.
These eggs develop into worker bees and rarely queens. Drone eggs are not fertilized, and it is not known how the queen controls this. The supply of sperm obtained when the queen is young usually lasts the rest of her life and she never mates again.
Queen honey bees live on average 1–2 years whereas workers live on average 15–38 days in the summer and 150–200 days in the winter.
Honeybees generally attack only to defend their colony, but will also attack if they are seriously disturbed outside the nest. Common sources of attack stimulus for honeybees include alarm pheromone, vibrations, carbon dioxide, hair, and dark colors (Crane 1990).
Either way, installing a queen will typically get your hive queenright again in less than a week. Allowing the bees to make their own queen can take much longer. It will take bees a minimum of 15 days to raise a new queen from brood and at least another 5 days for that queen to mate and start laying.
Instead of shouting information, the queen extrudes her pheromones to the bees closest to her, and those bees, in turn, amplify the queen's scent, and flap the information to the bees behind them. The information is eventually disseminated all the way out, like to the outskirts of an army.