Queen bee: role in the family

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

Unlike worker bees, which are females with an immature reproductive system, the queen bee can be fertilized and lay eggs. Its life expectancy is about 5 years. However, the full ability to reproduce is preserved only for the first two years. In the hive, the queen is an equal member of the community, which largely depends on the actions of workers.

A queen bee can lay two to three thousand eggs a day. The strength of the family directly depends on its quality. The old individual copes with its duties worse, the young one much better. In appearance, it is very different from worker bees. The uterus is several times larger, has a long abdomen, rounded on the sides. Wings cover only half of it. There are no devices on the legs designed to collect pollen. An infertile young uterus looks a little different: it has a small and thin abdomen. She is active and agile.

The development of the queen bee takes place in a specially built queen cell. He isacorn-like large cell. Larvae of worker bees are fed with royal jelly, which is a secret of the pharyngeal glands. Worker bees and drones receive similar food only for the first 3 days. After that, they switch to a slightly coarser food - a mixture of pollen and honey. The uterus, on the other hand, receives milk throughout the entire larval stage of development.

The same product is fed to her immediately after she starts laying eggs. At this time, a kind of retinue is formed around it from a group of young nurse bees. They clean it and take care of it in every possible way. By increasing or decreasing the diet, worker bees regulate egg laying. If the family remains for some reason without a queen, the bees immediately start breeding a new one. At the same time, they lay not one, but several uterine cells. This is explained by some features of the life of the swarm.

A young queen bee, leaving the nest, first of all goes in search of another queen, and when they meet, they immediately begin to “show things off”. The strongest one wins. If there are queens in the hive that are in the queen cells, the survivor will get them with her sting and there. However, the worker bees never let you destroy them all. The fact is that a young unfertilized uterus can simply fly away. In this case, the bees will have spare individuals, from which a new queen will be bred.

Within two weeks after leaving the nest, the queen bee leaves the hive several times in order to mark its location. On the fifteenth day of lifeshe flies out again to meet the drones. In flight, it is accompanied by a huge number of bees. She moves so fast that only the strongest drone can overtake her. Mating usually lasts 1-3 seconds. It occurs at a height of 5–30 m.

The queen most often mates not with one, but with 9-10 drones. On the third or fourth day, she becomes fertile and after that begins to lay fertilized eggs, from which worker bees will then hatch.

The fate of the drones is sad enough. Mated in flight with the uterus immediately die. Those that were not so agile, in the fall, when the colony begins to lack food, the worker bees are simply kicked out of the hive.

Some beekeepers, if the family is left without a queen, buy a new one. Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, this is not too difficult to do. Some, on their own, practice the removal of queen bees. This is quite complex and requires experience. The most important thing in this case is to choose a good parental family. To do this, comparisons are made in the apiary. It often happens that, under equal conditions, some families give much more honey than all the others. It is they who are suitable for obtaining queens and drones.