![]() In the world of bees the drone males are really only good for one thing and this is it. Not only is this an important day for the queen it is also an important day for all the male drones. If a male drone can catch the queen he will mate with her in mid air. The queen will dart around and fly as fast as she can to make sure that only the fittest and healthiest males will have the chance to mate with her. She may fly a mile or more away from the hive and high into the air to waft pheromone scents around areas that drones congregate in.Īs soon as this scent is picked up by the males from other colonies they will start to chase the queen for a chance to mate with her. Worker bees will feed, pamper and groom her and when she is ready she will leave the hive accompanied by a few workers. On this day the hive will be literally buzzing with activity and excitement. Once the queen bee has become fully developed she will prepare for her nuptial flight, where she will mate and collect the all the sperm she will need to produce the millions of eggs she will lay in her lifetime. Her pheromones will also be collected and distributed which acts as an inhibitor against workers starting other queen cells. At this point she will indeed be treated like a queen, she will be given food and her waste will be disposed of by the workers. She will eat, grow and be attended to by many worker bees. ![]() Now as the only queen in the hive, she can begin her life as the queen bee of the hive. Unfortunately there can only be one queen bee in the hive, so when a new queen emerges from her special cell the first thing she will do is seek out any other developing queens and kill them. This ensures they develop into a queen bee with a full reproductive system unlike the rest of the female worker bees. Once the eggs or larvae are chosen the colony will build special cells around them and feed the developing larvae inside high-quality food called royal jelly. If she is missing, the colony becomes aware very quickly and will get to work finding a suitable replacement. Once a larvae is more than a couple of days old, it will no longer make a good queen. The processes involved in creating a queen bee has to begin early in the bees' development. If this happens then workers will have to choose a suitable larvae and create a queen from it. ![]() The queen bee may have died or gone missing from the hive, or no longer able to lay fertilised eggs. One is a routine queen replacement when the current queen gets old, but sometimes the creation of a new queen could be more of an emergency. There are different situations that might lead to this. The bee colony can produce a new queen bee from a fertilised egg or young female larva. The male drones take a few days longer, while a queen can be produced in just a little over 2 weeks! The queen has the shortest development time in the whole hive- this could be because of the special attention she receives. The worker bees only take around 3 weeks to go through the whole metamorphosis from egg to adult honeybee. Starting as an egg, then onto larva, pupa and finally an adult bee. Honey bees have the same development path as other insects and pass through the same four stages. Fully mated and well fed queens can lay between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs a day which together would add up to more than her own body weight! ![]() The male drones do of course play a role that is vital to the continuation of the hive, that being their role in reproduction (that we will get to later) and for that reason they are tolerated by the female workers.Īs the queen bee is the only female bee in the hive that has a fully developed reproductive system, her primary job is laying eggs to create new bees. The male bees, called drones, are essentially a continual drain on the hive, using up valuable resources without helping out at all. They build the hive, protect it from intruders, collect the food, care for the young, clean and look after the queen. In a hive the female bees called workers, do all the work. To understand the queen bee life fully, we must also understand how all the bees function in the hive as a continual cycle. You might think that the queen bee has an easy life, lounging around in luxury every day, while thousands of worker bees take care of her every need but the role of queen bee comes with some big responsibilities. For her to fulfil her role as queen it will also take the hard work of the whole hive. The queen bee, as you might presume from her name, is a very important bee in a colony.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |