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.)