Habits of the Queen Bee

• The queen bee spends her life laying eggs.bee bees apises beehive hive insect image by Pali A from Fotolia.com
  
  In beehives, only the queen bee can produce offspring. The queen is raised differently than the worker bees and the drones. She is the largest member of the colony, produces her own successor and starts new colonies. If her egg production--1,500 eggs a day or more during the spring--slows down, a new queen will take her place.
  
  

Hatching

• A new queen comes from an egg just as workers and drones do, but eggs intended to be queens are laid in larger cells outside of the main hive. Worker, drone and queen eggs are fed royal jelly, a substance secreted by the worker bees, for the first three days. Then, the workers and drones are weaned onto other food, but the queen is fed only royal jelly for the rest of her life. The royal jelly is produced by the worker bees, who feed the queen bee for her whole life.
  
  

Mating

• The first thing the new queen does is kill the other queen pupas and the old queen. Then, she flies out of the hive to look for drones to mate with, as all the drones are male, while all the workers are female. The male drones die after mating. The queen usually mates only during this period and stores the sperm in her body. Which type of bee the eggs will turn out to be depends on how large the cell is where she lays them, what they are fed and whether they've been fertilized. Both worker and queen eggs must be fertilized. The worker eggs are laid in the smallest cells, the queen's in the largest. The drone eggs are laid in cells larger than the workers' cells and are from unfertilized eggs.
  
  

Colonizing

• The queen lives the longest of all the bees, up to five years. At the end of summer, she is the only bee that survives, and she will find a place to hibernate through the winter. In the summer, she will start a whole new colony.
  
  Another way for a new colony to start is for a newly hatched queen to leave with a large number of drones and workers. This will happen if the hive has grown too large. In this case, the new queen does not kill the old one. The workers have control through feeding and care of when new queens are produced.