What Does a Queen Bee Do? Life of the Colony's Mother

The queen’s main job: laying eggs

Every honey bee colony normally has one queen, the only fully fertile female among tens of thousands of bees. In the western honey bee, she spends almost her whole adult life inside the hive walking over the comb, inspecting cells and laying a single egg in each clean one.

At the height of the season she can lay up to about 2,000 eggs a day, more than her own body weight. She also decides what sex each egg will be. In smaller worker cells she releases a few stored sperm to fertilize the egg, which becomes a female worker. In larger drone cells she lays an unfertilized egg, which becomes a male drone. Laying slows in autumn, often stops in winter and starts again as the days lengthen.

The queen cannot look after herself. A rotating “court” of young workers surrounds her, licking and touching her, feeding her with protein-rich secretions and carrying her scent through the hive.

How the queen steers the colony with scent

The queen’s real power is chemical. Glands in her jaws produce queen mandibular pheromone, a blend of compounds that workers pick up and spread from bee to bee. While it flows, workers know a healthy queen is present. The pheromone:

• stops workers from building queen cells and raising rivals;
• keeps the workers’ ovaries from developing, so they do not lay eggs;
• holds a swarm together and attracts workers to her;
• attracts drones during mating flights.

When she is lost, the absence of her scent is noticed within hours. When she grows old and her pheromone weakens, workers start raising a successor. You can read more about this chemical language in how bees communicate.

How royal jelly makes a queen

A queen and a worker begin from the same kind of fertilized egg; what decides their fate is food and space. All young larvae are fed royal jelly, a milky secretion from glands in the heads of young workers, for their first few days. Worker larvae are then switched to a diet that includes pollen and honey, while a future queen gets royal jelly throughout her larval life.

Queen larvae are raised in special queen cells, large peanut-shaped cups that hang vertically from the comb. The rich diet turns on a different pattern of genes, and the larva develops into a larger female with full-sized ovaries. A queen takes only about 16 days from egg to adult, compared with about 21 for a worker.

Virgin queens and mating flights

When several new queens are reared, the first to emerge usually seeks out the others, still in their cells, and stings them to death. If two emerge at the same time, they fight. Before emerging, young queens make piping and quacking sounds, which seem to help the workers manage the contest.

About a week after emerging, the surviving virgin queen takes one or more mating flights. She flies to a drone congregation area, a spot where drones from many colonies gather in the air, often 10–40 m (30–130 ft) above the ground. There she mates in flight with about a dozen or more drones, sometimes 20 or more, each of whom dies after mating. She stores several million sperm in a small organ called the spermatheca, enough to fertilize eggs for years, and never mates again.

How long does a queen bee live?

A honey bee queen usually lives 2–5 years, far longer than her workers, who live weeks in summer and a few months in winter. There are reports of queens reaching about 8 years. Many beekeepers replace queens every year or two because older queens lay fewer eggs. Compare the castes in how long bees live.

How a colony replaces its queen

Workers replace a queen in three main situations:

Swarming is how colonies reproduce; see why bees swarm. If a colony loses its queen and has no young larvae left, some workers start laying unfertilized eggs. These produce only drones, and the colony dwindles and dies.

Myths about the queen bee

For centuries, people assumed the leader of the hive was a king. In 1609, the English beekeeper Charles Butler argued that it was female, and later in the 17th century the Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam showed under the microscope that the “king” had ovaries. The name “queen” stuck, but it suggests more control than she really has.

Queens rarely sting people; their curved, smooth stinger is mainly for rival queens. Bumblebee and wasp colonies also have queens, but they live about a year and, unlike honey bee queens, found their nests alone each spring.