How do bees pick their queen?
Question by Dukie: How do bees pick their queen?
THX GUYS!!!! But i’ll let the voters pick the best answer, they’re both great!
What do you think? Answer below!
4 Responses to How do bees pick their queen?
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Question by Dukie: How do bees pick their queen?
THX GUYS!!!! But i’ll let the voters pick the best answer, they’re both great!
What do you think? Answer below!
The queen is fed with royal honey, and this is what is currently killing the honey bees.
Aang
March 27, 2013 at 2:13 pm
The first one to get knocked up by the king is crowned the queen!
Heather
March 27, 2013 at 2:56 pm
It’s not a question of picking.
Queens are produced in special cells in an established hive. They have the same genetics as the workers…. they are all diploid and all females. Males are produced in a separate process and are haploid (they lack fathers).
The first new queen to hatch usually kills the other developing queens. So now we have two queens in the hive. What happens is that the old queen takes about 1/2 of the workers, and leaves the hive. That’s when you see “swarms” of honeybees. The old queen that tries to re-establish her colony in another location.
If an established hive has a queen die, it’s in bad shape. A worker might start laying eggs…but they are infertile and even if they hatched, would produce male bees (drones). If you were raising this bee hive, you could buy from a commercial source a new queen….but you just can’t introduce her into the colony because she would be killed. Instead, you put her inside a tube and put that inside the queenless hive so the workers get used to her. After a period of acclimation, she can safely be released from the tube.
DrJ
March 27, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Bees don’t pick their queen per se. The queen is the mother to every bee in the hive. When the queen dies or becomes a drone layer, she can no longer fill the hive with her pheromone that keeps everyone in line and doing their jobs. The workers take one or several female larva and put them in a queen cells. This cell hangs rather than is inclined at about 17 degrees The queen cell looks somewhat like a peanut. All larva are fed “ROYAL JELLY” for the first 72 hrs. The females that are selected by the hive to become queens are fed royal jelly until the fimish their larva stage and pupate. They then emerge as queen bees capable of mating. When more than one queen is hatched, the first one goes into any qreen cells and kills her sisters before they can emerge. If they do emerge they figt to the dearth. The queen then goes on her maiden flight and mates with up to 20 drones. The males who mate die. The queen returns to the hive and spends her life laying eggs. She can fertilize them with the saved up sperm and produce females or she can lay the eggs without the sperm and create drones. In a short time all the old bees die and all the new bees that take their place belong to new queen. The bees do select female larva under 72 hours old to produce new queens when needed.If the queen dies and there are no young female larva the hive would soon die out. However, the bees have one last stategy to insure that the linage of the hive lives on. The females unrestricted by queen phermones will become egg layers. They have never bred so , like the queen, their unfertililzed eggs can produce only drones. These drones are raised and sent out into the world to continue the linage of the hive in another queen. The drones sacrifice them selves in a last ditch effort to save the linage of the hive. It’s painful job, but someone has to do it.
VINCE
March 27, 2013 at 3:16 pm