Queen bee

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For other uses, see Queen bee (disambiguation).

The queen bee is an adult, mated female in a honeybee colony or hive; she is usually the mother of all the bees in the hive. The queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed in order to become sexually mature. There is normally only one adult, mated queen in a hive.

[edit] Development

Peanut-like queen brood cells extend outward and downward from the broodcomb. This picture likely depicts emergency cells.

Queen larva floating on royal jelly in open queen cell.

Queen cell opened to show queen pupa (with darkening eyes).

The queen develops more fully than sexually immature workers because she is given royal jelly, a secretion from glands on the heads of young workers, for an extended time. She develops in a specially-constructed queen cell, which is larger than the cells of normal brood comb, and is oriented vertically instead of horizontally.

The best queens emerge from replacement queen cells. As the young queen larva pupates with her head down, the workers cap the cell with beeswax. When ready to emerge, she will chew a circular cut around the cap of her cell. Often the cap swings open when most of the cut is made, so as to appear like a hinged lid. Queen cells that are opened on the side indicate that the virgin queen was likely killed by a rival.

When the young queens are ready to emerge, they often begin to "pipe", a shrill peeping, which is thought to be a challenge to other emerged or ready-to-emerge virgins. Unless the workers restrain them, emerged virgin queens will quickly find and kill rivals. During the swarm season, workers may separate young queens, thus keeping several alive at once for longer than a brief period. The extra queens may go with swarms or afterswarms to sort out their survival in a new home. The separation of virgin queens may also be an extra precaution for hive survival. In the time leading up to a swarm, the old queen will stop laying eggs several days before she leaves with the prime swarm. Usually, there are several maturing queen cells in the remaining hive. In case a virgin queen does not come back from a nuptial flight the bees may hold back a standby. A queenless hive with larvae older than 4 days is not able to create an emergency queen.

[edit] Reproduction

When one queen survives in a colony, she will go out on a sunny, warm day to mate with 12-15 drones. She has only a limited time to mate, and if she is unable to fly because of bad weather and remains unmated, she will become a "drone layer." Drone-laying queens usually mean the death of the colony, because the workers have no fertilized (female) larvae from which to raise a replacement. If there is a deficit of drones, or the weather provides too brief a window for full mating, the queen may be able to function briefly, laying fertilized eggs for a few weeks or months, until she runs out of sperm cells and ceases laying fertilized eggs much sooner than the normal 2-3 year life span of queens.

If workers realize their queen is failing, and the weather will allow a replacement to be raised and mated, the bees can "supersede" the queen. However, supersedure will fail in winter in colder climates because there are no drones and the queens cannot fly to mate.

A special, rare case of reproduction is thelytoky: the reproduction of female workers or queens by laying worker bees. Thelytoky occurs in the Cape bee, Apis mellifera capensis, and has been found in other strains at very low frequency.

[edit] Daily life for the queen

Unmarked adult queen with attendants.

Although the name might imply it, a queen has no control over the hive. Her sole function is to serve as the reproducer; she is an "egg laying machine." A good queen of quality stock, well reared with good nutrition and well mated, can lay about 2,000 eggs per day during the spring build-up and live for two or more years. She lays her own weight in eggs every couple of hours and is continuously surrounded by young worker attendants, who meet her every need, giving her feed and disposing of her waste. They also lick her body for the pheromones called queen substance, that is needed to stop worker bees from laying eggs of their own.

Because the social structure is so complex and fixed, a honeybee colony can be thought of as a single organism, and the individual bees as simply cells of the organism; they cannot survive on their own. The queen is responsible for the reproduction of the "cells", but also is responsible through her own pheromone production for the reproduction of the whole colony. This usually takes place in the spring and is called swarming.

[edit] Identification

The queen bee's abdomen is noticeably longer than the worker honeybees surrounding her. Even so, in a hive of 60,000 to 80,000 honeybees, it is often difficult for beekeepers to find the queen with any speed; for this reason, many queens in non-feral colonies are marked with a light daub of paint on their thorax. The paint used does no harm to the queen and makes her much easier to find when necessary.

Although the color is sometimes randomly chosen, professional queen breeders use a system whereby the color of a queen's dot indicates what year she hatched. This aids beekeepers who are deciding whether their queens are too old to maintain a strong hive and need replacing. Sometimes even a tiny plate marked with the identification number of the queen is used.

[edit] Supersedure

Supersedure is the process by which an old queen bee is replaced by a new queen. Supersedure will occur naturally or can be induced. Natural supersedure may be initiated due to old age of a queen or a diseased or failing queen. As the queen ages her pheromone output diminishes. Nosema disease is also implicated in queen supersedure.

The natural process starts when the bees make supersedure cells to replace a laying queen. In a beehive the location of supersedure cells differ from swarm cells. Supersedure cells rarely hang from the bottom of a frame but can be found in the center of the brood nest.

Supersedure may be forced by a beekeeper. By simply clipping off one of the middle or posterior legs from the resident queen she will be unable to properly place her eggs at the bottom of the brood cell. The workers will detect this and will then rear replacement queens. When a new queen is available the workers will kill the reigning queen. The workers form a warming ball around the queen and so kill her by overheating - this is called by beekeepers "balling the queen", and can be a problem when introducing a new queen to a hive. This overheating method is also used to kill large predatory wasps (e.g. the Asian giant hornet) that enter the hive in search of brood. Forced supersedure should only be done when drones are available to inseminate the new queen. The emerging virgin queen may not survive one of her several nuptual flights which may result in a queenless hive. Monitoring for a laying queen is recommended when forcing a queen supersedure.

[edit] Virgin queen bee

A virgin queen is a queen bee that has not mated with a drone. Virgins are intermediate in size between workers and mated, laying queens, and are much more active than the latter. They are hard to spot while inspecting a frame, because they run across the comb, climbing over worker bees if necessary, and may even take flight if sufficiently disturbed. Virgin queens can often be found clinging to the walls or corners of a hive during inspections.

Virgin queens appear to have little queen pheromone and often do not appear to be recognized as queens by the workers. A virgin queen in her first few hours after emergence can be placed into the entrance of any queenless hive or nuc and acceptance is usually very good, whereas a mated queen is usually recognized as a stranger and runs a high risk of being killed by the older workers.

Virgins will quickly find and kill (by stinging) any other emerged virgin queen (or be dispatched themselves), as well as any unemerged queens. She locates them by piping. An empty queen cell will show whether the queen emerged normally (open on the tip) or whether it was torn down from the side and its queen killed by another.

When a colony is preparing to swarm, the workers may prevent virgins from fighting and one or several virgins may go with the swarm while other virgins stay behind with the remnant of the hive. As many as 21 virgin queens have been counted in a single large swarm. When the swarm settles into a new home, the virgins will then resume normal behavior and fight to the death until only one remains. The old queen will usually be allowed to live and continue laying, but within a couple weeks she will disappear and the former virgin, now mated, will take her place.

[edit] Piping

Piping describes a noise made by queen bees. Adult queens communicate through vibratory signals quacking from virgin queens and tooting from queens free in the colony, collectively known as piping. A piping queen can be a virgin queen, which gives off a series of sounds, frequently before she emerges from her cell. Mated queens may briefly pipe after being released in a hive. The piping sound is variously described as a children's trumpet tooting and quacking. It is quite loud and can be clearly heard outside the hive. The piping sound is created by the flight motor without movement of the wings. The vibration energy is resonated by the thorax. More than one queen may be in a single hive as a result of supercedure or swarming. Multiple Queen cells are prepared in both cases and five days after sealing the queen cell the developing queen can pipe. In the case of swarming, the queens will usually be virgins that remain after the primary swarm has left with the old queen. When the first virgin queen emerges from her queen cell she quickly tries to find and kill other queens, hatched or still inside their queen cells. It is postulated that the piping is a form of battle cry announcing to competing queens and the workers their willingness to fight. It may also be a signal to the worker bees which queen is the most worthwhile to support.

The piping sound is a G sharp or A natural. The adult queen pipes for a two-second pulse followed by a series of quarter-second toots. The queens of Africanized bees produce more vigorous and frequent bouts of piping.

[edit] External links

• Audio file of piping queens
• SOUND COMMUNICATION IN HONEYBEES accessed 05/2005
• The Feminin' Monarchi', Or the History of Bees by Charles Butler, 1634, London; accessed 05/2005
• The "piping" and "quacking" of queen bees
• Listen to the bees by Rex Boys, 1999; The Cottage GL20 7ER; accessed 05/2005
• Bees Gone Wild Apiaries, accessed 05/2005
• THE AFRICAN HONEY BEE: Factors Contributing to a Successful Biological Invasion Stanley Scott Schneider, Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman,Deborah Roan Smith, Annual Rev. Entomology 2004. 49:351–76; accessed 05/2005
• Reproductive conflict in the honey bee Nicolas Châline, PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, September 2004, accessed 05/2005