The Queen is the ultimate egg laying machine and is solely responsible for the 80,000 to 200,000 or so workers and few hundred drones found in a typical established colony. Her life begins much as that of any worker, but it drastically changes when the workers bees decide they need another queen in the hive. There are several reasons a queen could be required during the active season, swarming and replacing the existing queen are two typical reasons.

Just remember that the queen begins her life as another "worker egg" laid by the hives existing queen. With in a few days, for what ever reason, the egg or in some cases the larva of this worker is taken to a special cell called a queen cell and it is there she will develop into a new queen with the help of the workers.
 

Queen Cell Types

Queen Cells look like a peanut shell and actually are built out and away from the other cells that sit neatly within the frames 1.25 inch thick body. There are two types of queen cells, Supercedure and swarm. They both are cells designed to rear new queens in. Remember, all queens start as normal worker eggs or larva and the only difference is in their feeding and the size of the cell. Shown here is a queen cell that is fully sealed and only days away from having a queen emerge. Note the peanut shape of the cell and further notice how far the queen cell sticks out from the rest of the cells. Click image for wallpaper sized image.

Supercedure cells are queen cells found along the center of a given frame. It looks just like any other queen cell. You may see 2 or 3 of these at a time when a FAILING QUEEN needs replacement. It doesn't take workers ( or a good Beekeeper ) too long replace a queen laying in poor or sporadic patterns or the existing queen may be getting old or has been recently killed and needs replacement as soon as possible. Supercedure cells are made to host a queen that is being raised to REPLACE an existing queen. 

Swarm cells are found clinging to the bottom of the brood frame and are used to rear a SECOND QUEEN, needed for flying off with half the hive's population, thus making room for thousands of new bees in the hive. The bees that swarm leave with the new queen - see my swarming section. This swarming is the colonies natural ability to multiple quickly. Each hive swarms several times each season, a healthy hive with a strong queen can swarm 4 or more times in a warm season.

The Emergence of the Queen

Without getting over technical, the queen bees emerge days sooner than the same bees would IF they were left as workers. This comes from a solid feeding of Royal Jelly, a glandular secretion fed to the queen by workers during her larva stage. The new queens are tended to by nearly all the colonies bees at one time or another, this touching of the queens allows her scent, known as a pheromone to pass from bee to bee, aiding them in smooth and logical understanding of their duties. 

It can not be emphasized enough that pheromones control positive communication throughout the hive. A dead queen is sure doom to the hive and their attitude promotes even faster decline. Workers stumble around with no clear idea of what their duties are without the queens scent. Of course, they have enough instinctual sense to create a new queen if there are eggs or young larva to work with. If not, the hive will likely perish at the end of the season.

After escaping her peanut shaped cell the queen is cleaned and cared for by a rotating group of worker bees called the queens court. Again, the court is a small collection of the many thousand of bees that live in the hive. Generally, the court is comprised of 2-week-old workers who are nearing the final stage of their lives, the gathering time. But just before they become foragers a 3 weeks of age, the spend time doing housekeeping duties, including tending to the queen.

On her first day as a queen, she will learn the basic layout of the colony, where the egg laying cells are and she will pick up the improved morale due to her successful birth. She is escorted around the hive, and during this time she meets with many of the workers as they frantically clean cells for the expected "egg laying" that the queen will do over the many months and years ahead.

Mating Basics

It isn't until day three that the queen is ready to mate. Her wings are now stretched and strong enough to support her in flight and her mating organs are fully developed and ready for the age-old ritual of mating.

The queen leaves the hive and flies to a height of nearly 30-ft above the hive. Male bees called Drones from other colonies take turns coupling with the queen while in flight until the queen feels the deed is complete. In that short flight, she would have mated with 10 or more drones and during their coupling, the drones sex organ snapped off and stayed inside the queen until every bit of sperm was transferred. The drones fall helplessly to the ground to die.

The queen returns with enough sperm to successfully lay fertile eggs for years to come. The sperm is kept alive in the queen's body and feed a protein substance produced internally by the queen. She will never have to mate again and she soon will begin laying upwards of 1500 to 2000 eggs a day for as long as 5 years. Making the honeybee queen one of natures most prolific creatures.

Shown in this photo at the center is a newly born queen/ Notice her large, slim body, paler colors and shorter wings. This may sound like it's easy to find a queen, which isn't always the case. Remember, each box has 10 frames and 2 sides with tens of thousands of worker bees busily moving around. It takes a keen eye to pick out an unmarked queen from a hive.

Egg Laying Queens

After mating, the queen goes right to work laying eggs. This is the moment that the workers have been awaiting since the queens birth three days earlier. A typical colony has a death rate of 1000 to 1200 workers a day, due to old age, accidents, attacks, etc.. At this huge depletion rate, and without the constant out put of new workers to tend to in hive activity, eventually all that would exist are foragers and guard bees and without the queen's pheromone there would be no sense or order to any of the hives activities. The hive is literally doomed without a laying queen. Shown here is a queen laying a worker egg in a very shallow cell that will be built up later by the workers. Queens will lay in any cell that is drawn out - this also gives the workers the incentive to build out the comb quickly. Click on the image for a wallpaper sized version of the image.

Sometimes, a worker or group of workers will start laying egg. This "half-hearted" game of nature which only  produces drones, because the worker bees have incomplete reproduction organs and can not produce workers. The drones are natures way to help other hives survive because it knows that this hive is doomed. So by producing excessive drones, other hives queens have a chance to mate and hopefully THEY will survive, where this hive failed. But, importantly it carries on the bloodline of the colony.

Once the queen has mated she soon begins laying eggs. She will walk over the empty and cleaned out cells, looking deeply in and inspecting each one before she will walk passed the cell and back into the cell to deposit the eggs. The queen is very picky and will not deposit an egg into a cell that was not cleaned to her satisfaction.

The queen backs in to the cell and produces a small sticky substance that the egg will adhere to. The egg is laid at the bottom center of the cell in a standing position. After the egg is laid, the queen moves to the next cell and repeats this process. She will do this more than 1500 times every day for up to 5 years. The queen will take short rest periods of 5 or 10 minutes, but generally speaking lays eggs around the clock.

In the queen's body, the eggs and sperm are kept separate from each other. Remember earlier that I mentioned that the sperm is kept alive by feeding it protein within the queen's body. The queen actually has a small valve that she can control by restriction, which either allows or prevents a single sperm from being deposited on the egg she lays. If the queen lays an egg in a worker cell, she allows one sperm to attach to the egg, thus producing a worker. If the egg is laid and no sperm is attached, it will develop into a drone.

The workers actually determine what type of egg (drone or worker) the queen will lay, by leading her to two different size cells. The large drone cells are usually found in the corners where the pollen and nectar are stored. Drone cells are larger than worker cells because drones are large, almost twice as big as a worker.

Queens can drive you crazy

This short chapter is being added after dealing with the loss of a brand new queen which was shipped with a 3 pound package of bees in the Spring of 2001. Most of my site contains time sensitive material, such as my Interactive Logbook and New Beginnings Project - but some of the information is timeless too. Such is the problems that poor laying or rejected queens can do to your bee yard.

After installing a newly mated young queen to C2 ( Colony 2 ) I gave the colony a few days to release her and the workers did chew their way through the small block of candy and released the queen. All looked good for several days, but after four or five days I checked again and the queen was gone! This has happened to all beekeepers at one time or another, but it's frustrating because usually it happens for reasons that we just can't fathom. Remember that thinking like the bee becomes easier the more you work with bees, but accepting a queen often defies logic.

We can say guess a few reasons for her being killed off, but no one knows for sure which of the reasons the workers acted on.  And sometimes, for no obvious reason to the beekeeper, the workers choose to kill off the queen and during the early days of a new colony this can be fatal without intervention.

The most common reason is that the queen was released too early and the workers ( who came from hives that had established queens ) had not accepted her pheromone scent - the workers still have an allegiance to the old queens pheromone. This allegiance dies off as the workers have no other scent to guide them except this newly mated queen that was shipped with them.

The next common reason is that this new queen lacks a strong pheromone scent and is considered a poor queen by the workers. Often, as bizarre as it sounds - a colony would rather have no queen in stead of a poor queen. In a new colony with no eggs or larva this is a death warrant to the hive. 

Please read the installation of the new queen and packaged bee, especially the  April 28th Logbook entry and all the  May Logbook  to see the daily events that followed the loss of C2s queen to see what a back yard beekeeper can do to replace a missing queen if you have another hive to grab eggs from. Otherwise you will be ordering a new queen and having her airmailed ASAP. 

Queens are miraculous and fun to watch. I've spent hours looking at the and I never get tired of following them as they search for more and more cells to lay their eggs in. I hope I have given you some insight on the good and the bad of queens. The log entries are great for a real time line. Nothing happens in beekeeping over night. You will find that everything works in specific order and in specific numbers of days.