Feminist, Female dominated, Matriarchal…all of these terms pretty much sum up society in a bee colony. Despite what movies like “The Bee Movie” portray, all worker bees are female. The only purpose of the Male (Drone) is to fertilize the queen. Once the drone achieves his purpose he dies immediately. If he fails to fertilize the queen he will be kicked out of the hive by the workers and die. The workers all have one goal, protect the queen and ensure the safety of the hive. Talk about Girl Power!
So let’s talk about the Queen. She is the Monarch of the hive. She controls the temperament of the colony. She is the one who lays all the eggs and ultimately controls the population of the hive. Her only job is to lay eggs. She does not feed, clean, fan, or cool herself. Her every need is tended to by queen host bees, whose sole purpose is to care for her so that she can stay focused on her primary task, laying eggs. A good queen is an egg laying machine.
A Queen starts out genetically like all other worker bees as an egg. The difference begins when her egg is placed inside a Queen cell which contains Royal Jelly at the bottom of the cell. It is this rich Royal Jelly diet which changes her genetically to look different than the rest of the workers. Worker bees do not get fed Royal Jelly which means they will never become Queen. A Queen has a longer body than a worker bee. The Royal Jelly causes the full development of her ovaries which allows her to lay eggs.
Typically a hive will produce a dozen queen cells, but only one queen can rule at a time. When a new a queen is born she will eventually take over the hive and the older queen will leave the hive and take a few thousand bees with her to form a swarm. A queen bee has a much longer lifespan than the worker bee. She has a productive lifespan of anywhere from one to three years. As she ages she will eventually be overthrown by a younger more productive egg-laying queen.
Take a look at the video below. It’s a clip of the Bee Whisperer pulling a frame out at the Bee Clinic. By chance he spotted the Queen in a small swarm. Since we get a lot of questions about what a Queen bee looks like, we thought it would be a good clip to showcase along with this blog post. Notice the Queen is a different shape. She is bigger length wise and has a skinnier body.
