People think that the queen bee is the ruler of the colony, that she controls everything. She in a sense she is, but she is also the slave of the colony, doing her bidding. She really is an egg-laying machine. At her best, when conditions are ideal, she can lay between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs per day.
If for some reason it’s not as good as the colony thinks it should be, maybe it’s getting too old or not productive enough, it can be replaced in less than three weeks. The only difference between a worker bee and the queen bee is the way it feeds in the larval stage of its development.
All workers and queens are women; they hatch from fertilized eggs laid by the resident queen. If the queen has been lost, perhaps eaten by something or crushed by a careless beekeeper, the entire colony becomes aware of that fact within a few hours. Since honey bees share food with each other and of course they all get some of the pheromone, sometimes called the queen substance, which is produced by the queen bee. If they stop getting enough of that substance because the queen has died, she is too old, or simply because the hive is too full, a response is triggered in the workers to create a new queen.
The workers select an egg or a very young larva that they have decided to turn into queen bees. They often choose multiple prospects and raise multiple queen bees at the same time.
Normally, worker bees are fed royal jelly, a protein-rich food secreted by a gland on the nurse bee’s head, for a few days. The larva is then weaned on a mixture of pollen and nectar or honey, sometimes called bee bread.
The queen, however, is not weaned off the royal jelly, but the workers continue to feed this highly nutritious food to the larva for about 5 days. She gains weight very quickly, her size multiplies many times. The beeswax cell in which it develops has to enlarge and elongate to accommodate the much larger queen larva. Approximately 7 days after the egg was originally ugly, the queen cell is capped and sealed within the larvae which pupate, emerging around the sixteenth day.
If the new queen was created because the hive was overcrowded and just before the new queen emerged, the previous queen leaves the hive along with about half of the worker bees and flies off to find a new home. This is what is called a swarm. If weather conditions are not good enough for the swarm to leave, workers prevent the new queen bee from emerging until the weather improves.
Having emerged from her cell, the new queen bee remains in the hive for a few days, fighting to the death with any other queen bees that have been created alongside her. The victorious queen leaves the hive 4-7 days after emerging, depending on weather conditions. She flies in circles to get her bearings, then heads out to find males, drones, to mate with.
Queen bees and drones congregate on flight paths about 20 feet above the ground. The virgin queen will mate with ten to twelve different drones, which die after mating. The queen may make several mating flights over the next few days and then never leave the hive again unless with a swarm.
Having completed mating, the queen bee returns to the hive with enough sperm stored for the rest of her life. She begins to lay eggs, measuring each cell as she goes and fertilizing the eggs in the smaller worker cells. She then lays unfertilized eggs in larger cells that develop into drones. This is how a bee becomes a queen bee.