Glossary
The single fertile female in a honey bee colony. The queen's primary role is to lay eggs, sometimes up to 2,000 per day. A colony cannot survive without a healthy, productive queen.
Despite what her title suggests, the queen bee does not "rule" the colony in any decision-making sense. Her role is singular and essential: reproduction. A healthy, mated queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day during peak season, fertilizing each egg as it passes through her oviduct with sperm she has stored from mating flights taken early in her life.
The queen also produces pheromones, chemical signals that regulate the behavior and mood of the entire colony. Her "queen mandibular pheromone" (QMP) suppresses the reproductive development of worker bees, signals that the colony has a functioning queen, and helps maintain social cohesion among tens of thousands of individual bees.
Genetically, a queen starts as an ordinary fertilized egg, identical to any worker bee larva. The difference is nutrition. When a colony needs a new queen (because the current queen is aging, injured, or has died), workers select several young larvae and begin feeding them exclusively with royal jelly, a protein-rich secretion from worker bees' hypopharyngeal glands. This diet of pure royal jelly triggers the development of a fully fertile queen rather than a sterile worker.
The queen cells are distinctively large and peanut-shaped, hanging vertically from the comb face. Multiple queen cells are often built simultaneously, and the first queen to emerge typically seeks out and destroys the remaining queen cells before they hatch.
A new queen takes a mating flight within the first 1 to 2 weeks of her life. She flies to a "drone congregation area" (DCA), often a mile or more from the hive, and mates with 12 to 20 drones from other colonies in midair. She stores the sperm in a specialized organ called the spermatheca and never mates again for the rest of her life.
A queen bee can live 3 to 5 years, far longer than worker bees (4-6 weeks in summer) or drones (a few months). However, as she ages, her egg-laying rate and pheromone production decline. When this happens, the colony may initiate "supersedure," raising a new queen to replace her while she is still alive.
During hive inspections, one of the first things a beekeeper looks for is evidence of a healthy queen: a consistent pattern of eggs and larvae in the brood frames. Finding the queen herself, usually identified by a longer abdomen and sometimes a colored dot placed by the beekeeper, confirms the colony's reproductive health. A colony that has lost its queen will become agitated, productivity will drop, and without intervention, the colony will eventually collapse.
A queen bee typically lives 3 to 5 years, though her peak egg-laying productivity is usually in the first 2 years. Worker bees live only 4 to 6 weeks during active season, making the queen one of the longest-lived members of the colony.
Not indefinitely. Without a queen, worker bees cannot produce new workers to replace those that die. If the colony has young enough larvae, workers may raise an emergency queen. If not, the beekeeper must intervene by introducing a new queen.
Yes, the queen has a smooth stinger (unlike workers' barbed stingers) that she can use repeatedly. However, she almost exclusively uses it to kill rival queens. Queens very rarely sting humans.
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