How do you tell a boy bee from a girl bee?

We talked about the worker bees and that they are all female. What about the boys? There aren't as many male bees in the hive as there are female bees. This is because the queen can decide when she lays an egg whether or not the egg will be male or female. Neat trick, eh? Why doesn't she lay more male eggs? Because male honeybees don't work! The female worker bees do all the work in the hive: cleaning cells, feeding baby bees, making honey, gathering pollen and nectar, guarding the hive. What do the male bees do?

Not much. Well, not much in the beehive. We call the male bees drones. The drones don't do any of the work that the female worker bees do. Beekeepers have always known that the drones don't work. The word drone is even used to tease people about being lazy! But surely the honeybee drones do something. What do the drones bees do? Maybe we can find out something about what they do by comparing them to the worker bees. Notice in this picture of a drone above that the drone has very large eyes. Here's a comparison of the three types of bees side-by-side. The drone bee definitely has the biggest eyes of the three. That makes me think that they probably do something that requires very good vision.

Each day, the drones will fly out of the hive and go to a meeting place outside the hive called a "drone congregation area." They wait there, all flying around like they're waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, a queen bee flies through the drone congregation area at top speed and the drones zip after her. If they catch up with her they will mate with her. So that must be why they need such big eyes! They need to see that queen flying by to catch her!

Drone photo from http://informedfarmers.com. Comparison image from http://www.bees-online.com

What does it mean to be the queen?

We already learned that the queen bee's main job is to lay all the eggs. But what does that mean? She's the only one laying eggs, so that means that all the worker bees hatched out in the hive are her daughters.

Daughters? What about her sons? Well, they're hers too, but they're very different from the worker bees, which are all female. Don't worry, we'll get to the boy bees soon.

Her daughters, the worker bees, follow her around, touching her with their antennae (the pair of "feelers" on their heads). They feed her royal jelly, the same "milk" that the worker bees feed to queen larvae. This group of worker bees that follow the queen bee around are called the "retinue" (RETT-in-you). We call it the retinue because that's the same word that we use for a human queen's followers. The retinue follows the queen because of a perfume that she makes called the queen pheromone (FAIR-oh-moan).

Queen pheromone is powerful stuff. It is a complicated mixture of smells that tells the bees that the queen is present and that she is healthy. Some scientists even think that the queen pheromone is one reason why all the worker bees serve the queen rather than try to be the queen too. It would be like having a perfume that makes you obey anyone wearing it!

Queen honeybee photo by Flickr user steveburt1947.

How do they choose the queen?

Last time we talked about what the queen bee spends most of her life doing: laying eggs. But what about before? How does she get to be the queen? Is there an elaborate ceremony there the other bees all bow and place a crown on her head?

Sorry, no.

The queen is picked at birth. When the former queen dies, the worker bees select an egg (or a itty bitty larva less than 3 days old) to feed and raise as the next queen. For its entire life, the tiny larva is fed with royal jelly. This royal jelly is a special milk made by the workers. It has lots of nutrients, so the larva grows big. She grows much bigger than a normal worker larva, and the workers build an addition onto her cell to make room. After she gets big enough to metamorphose (go from a larva to an adult bee), she becomes a pupa. The pupa is the stage of her life in which her body converts from a gooey white worm into an adult bee. After a little while, she is ready to emerge as the new queen.

In the normal life of the hive, sometimes the beehive gets too crowded. There are so many bees that they run out of room. It is time for the hive to swarm. Swarming is when the queen flies away with about half of the bees in the hive to find a new nest. The bees that are left behind when the hive swarms have to raise a new queen to take over the egg-laying in their hive. In this case, the old queen has already laid an egg in a special cell called a queen cup. The new queen will develop in the queen cup, fed constantly on royal jelly until she is big enough to be the new queen.


(Queen bee coronation illustration from flickr user art.crazed. Scanned from "The Bee," written and illustrated by Iliane Roels, Grosset & Dunlap, 1969. Queen larvae and queen pupae pictures by Wikimedia user Waugsberg.)

What does the queen bee do?

The queen bee. She's big. She doesn't look like a normal bee (aka a worker bee). What does it mean to be the queen? What does the queen bee do? The simple answer is, the queen bee lays eggs. Lots of eggs. I think I told you hundreds of eggs per day- I was wrong- it's over a thousand eggs per day! Pretty much non-stop, every 20-30 seconds. Check out this video:

Every time the queen bee sticks her abdomen (tail-like part at the end) into the cell, she lays an egg at the bottom of the cell. These tiny eggs will hatch into tiny larvae, or baby insects. In this picture below the tiny white things that look like rice grains are the eggs, the little white worms that look like they are in a little droplet of liquid are the newborn larvae.

The queen (aka "Big Momma") is normally the only bee that lays eggs in the hive. Her extreme egg-laying at least partially explains why she is so much bigger than the other bees. Like a pregnant mother, she has a big abdomen or belly to grow and hold all of those eggs.

(egg picture from Penn State Cooperative Extension website: http://www.extension.org/pages/26741/inspecting-a-colony)