The queen bee explained

What she is

A queen is a female honey bee reared from an ordinary fertilised egg on a diet of royal jelly throughout her larval life. That diet, rather than any genetic difference, produces a larger bee with functional ovaries, a smooth unbarbed sting and a lifespan measured in years rather than weeks.

She emerges after 16 days, mates within her first two weeks, and then almost never leaves the hive again except to swarm. She lays up to two thousand eggs a day at peak — more than her own body weight daily — and can live three to five years, though commercial beekeeping usually replaces her sooner.

The mating flight

1. 1EmergenceShe chews out of her cell and, if there are rivals, seeks them out and kills them.
2. 2OrientationShort flights in her first days to learn the hive's position.
3. 3Mating flightsOver several days she flies to a drone congregation area — a specific aerial location used year after year — and mates with ten to twenty drones from other colonies.
4. 4ReturnShe stores several million sperm in her spermatheca and uses them for the rest of her life. She never mates again.

What she does not do

She does not give orders. She does not decide when to swarm, where to forage or how much brood to rear. She does not choose which cells to lay in — workers prepare the cells and she lays where they have prepared. She cannot feed herself for long and is fed by attendants.

What she does is lay and signal. Her mandibular pheromone spreads through the colony by contact and tells every bee that a laying queen is present. When that signal weakens — because she is failing, or because the colony has grown too large for it to circulate — the workers begin raising replacements. The queen does not decide this and cannot prevent it.

Supersedure, swarming and emergency queens

Emergency queens are the weakest of the three, because the larvae selected were fed worker diet for their first days. A colony that has raised an emergency queen frequently supersedes her within a season.

What happens without one

A queenless colony that cannot raise a replacement is on a clock. Within a few weeks some workers' ovaries develop and they begin laying — but they are unmated, so every egg is haploid and becomes a drone. A laying-worker colony fills its comb with drone brood in worker cells and dies out.

The exception is the Cape honey bee of South Africa, whose workers can produce female offspring from unfertilised eggs through a form of parthenogenesis. That ability makes it a serious pest when moved into African honey bee territory, where its workers can invade and take over colonies.