Queen mandibular pheromone

Definition

Produced by the queen's mandibular glands and spread through the colony by workers grooming her and passing it on in food exchange. It suppresses worker ovary development, inhibits the building of new queen cells, and attracts a retinue. When it declines — because the queen is failing, has died, or the colony has grown too large for it to circulate — workers begin building queen cells.

Where the word gets used loosely

The queen is routinely described as controlling the colony through pheromone. It is better read the other way round: the signal is information the workers act on, and it is the workers who decide to supersede her.

Guide records that discuss this

• The signals inside a colonyThe waggle dance is the famous one and it is not the important one. A colony runs on a repertoire of vibratory pulses, brief contacts and chemical messages, several of which do more work in an ordinary day than the dance does in a season.
• How bees communicate by smellA honey bee colony is held together chemically. More than a dozen pheromones are known, they overlap in function, and most of what a bee does in a day is a response to one of them rather than to anything it has seen.

Question records that discuss this

• Do bees communicate with pheromones?Extensively, and it is the channel that actually holds a colony together. More than a dozen pheromones are known. Queen mandibular pheromone suppresses worker reproduction and queen rearing; brood pheromone shifts nursing and foraging effort; alarm pheromone marks a target and lowers the threshold for stinging.
• Why do bees feed each other mouth to mouth?It is called trophallaxis, and it does two jobs at once. It distributes food through the colony, and it distributes information: pheromones, including queen substance, and the odours of whatever is currently being collected, circulate through the same exchanges. It is how a colony behaves as a connected system.