🐝 Beekeeping For Everyone! - #5 - Honeybee Queen

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Consider starting with Post #1 or scroll to the bottom of this post for complete list.

Honeybee Queen - part 2

In the last post we left off with the newly hatched virgin queen wandering the hive looking for other unhatched queen cells to destroy. She will continue to wander around the hive for about a week while her exoskeleton and wings "harden". During this time the worker bees do not recognize her as a queen and pretty much ignore her. This is because she will not start producing the "queen pheromone" until she is mated.

After a week or so wandering around the hive, she will venture out on her mating flights. This is very dependent on the weather and rainy conditions will prevent or delay these flights. One of the dangers is long periods of rain or bad weather. She only has about a 2 week window to complete her mating flights to become a productive queen.

She will make multiple mating flights over a few days where she will mate with between 12 to 15 drones. The queen has spermatheca gland where she stores the sperm from the drones she mates with. Honeybee Queens only mate for a few day period in their life after which she will return to the hive and start laying eggs. Once she starts laying eggs, she will never mate again.

As discussed in previous posts, fertilized eggs produce female bees (either queen or worker) and unfertilized eggs produce male bees (drones).

Before a queen lays an egg, she will enter the cell head first to inspect it. If the cell meets here requirements she will then back up, turn around and back into the cell and lay the egg. The fascinating part of the process is that based on the cell size she will determine if it is appropriate for a worker or drone. Drones are bigger and require a bigger cell to pupate. If it is determined to be a worker, the queen will fertilize the egg with sperm from the spermatheca when she lays it. A good queen can lay from 1000-2000 eggs per day in her prime.

Since a queen only mates when she is young, the stored sperm is kept viable for many years.

^{image credit: Montgomery County Beekeepers}

Diversity

Since the queen mates with 12-15 drones, there is a high probability of her mating with multiple races or subspecies of drones. This is especially true in the US where there is no native subspecies and many variants are imported. This will often lead to sister workers having different color appearance due to different paternal genes.

^{image credit: Rusty Berlew}

Keeping pure races of Honeybees

Due to the open mating process of honeybee queens, keeping pure races is next to impossible unless located in an isolated area. To overcome this issue, Harry Laidlaw developed an artificial insemination process in 1923. Today, all major queen breeders are using artificially inseminated breeder queens. Here is a video of the process: