The following is a small excerpt from my previously published book, The Beekeeper's Guide.
Who runs the hive? How does the hive operate? Who does all the work? These are questions that need to be answered so you know what is going on in your hive and how the command structure within your hive is organized.
The queen is the center of the universe for the colony. Without her, the colony becomes listless, weak and eventually dies off. With her, all the activities of the worker bees have greater urgency; the colony thrives and produces honey, wax, pollen and propolis in abundance. The queen bee is literally the mother of the entire colony.
A queen’s life starts out as just another egg. Based on subtle clues, the worker bees decide the time is ripe for an insurrection. They build a queen cup, which is a hex that is slightly larger than the average comb hex and hangs vertically from the honeycomb instead of horizontally like the normal hex cell. The reigning queen comes along and lays an egg in this special hex cell. The egg is nothing special; if treated and fed like all the other eggs, it would merely become another worker bee. But, the workers want something special for this egg. If conditions are right, this egg will become queen in less than thirty days. After the egg is deposited in the cup, it will sit there for three days. Just like any other egg, after three days the egg will hatch into a larva. The workers begin to feed this special future royalty exclusively with royal jelly. Every other larva gets a bit of royal jelly in their diet, but the future queen eats only royal jelly. On the ninth day after being laid, the workers come and cap the wax hex. On the sixteenth day, the new virgin queen is ready to emerge from her cell. She chews off the top of her cell and comes forth in all her regal splendor.
Immediately, she has a fight on her hands…er, legs. She will seek out the current queen and begin a fight to the death. The loser dies. The winner rules. Often, when the worker bees sense a change in the air, they will produce six to twelve of these future queens. Mother Nature seems to feel a bit of back up is in order in case the first virgin queen to emerge loses the battle with the old monarch. The first virgin queen to emerge and then win the battle against the reigning royal will seek out any unemerged queen larvae and sting them to death in their cells. This ensures that she rules supreme, for in the bee hive there can only be one queen.
The virgin queen takes her maiden flight within a few days. She will choose a calm, sunny day. Up she flies to a nearby “drone congregation area”. There she will mate in flight with between twelve and twenty drones. She is able to store upwards of 6 million sperm in her spermatheca and will use these over the next years of her life to fertilize her amazing egg laying habit. After mating, which she only does this once, she returns to the hive and within three days begins to lay up to an astounding 2000 eggs every day during the spring build up. This number can fluctuate a bit, but over her lifetime, a healthy queen will lay millions of eggs. She can control the sex of the eggs and will carefully lay just a few drones for every thousand worker bees. The queen spends the rest of her life laying eggs. She does nothing else. Her every need is attended to by the worker bees that surround her for the rest of her life. They feed her, carry off her waste and distribute her queen mandibular pheromone—which is the pheromone that lets the hive all know the queen is on the throne and she is doing well.
INTERESTING NOTE: A virgin queen will often pipe. This is a vibrational signal similar to quacking or tooting. Right before she emerges, a virgin queen will make a G# sound in a two second pulse followed by a series of 1/4 second toots. For some reason, before a virgin queen emerges from her cell the signal is more like a quacking. Once emerged, the sound becomes more like a toot. Both sounds are referred to as piping. Piping is thought to be a battle cry calling forth any competitors to battle. Interestingly enough, a mated queen that is introduced into a new hive also will pipe. Most experts think it is the way she signals to the workers in the hive that she is a valid ruler.
My book, The Beekeeper's Guide, is available for purchase on Amazon right here.
© 2015, Stone Golem Publishing, All rights reserved--no part of this may be used without express written consent.
**The picture is from Pixabay. They have it marked as labeled for reuse.
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