Raising Royalty: How Honey Bee Colonies Produce a New Queen
When a honey bee colony needs a new queen—either because the old queen has died, is failing, or the colony is preparing to swarm—the worker bees begin the process of queen rearing. This starts when the bees select several young larvae (less than three days old) and place them in specially made queen cups. These queen cups, later formed into queen cells once the queen is developing in the pupal stage, are larger than typical brood cells and hang vertically in the hive. The worker bees feed the chosen queen larvae exclusively with royal jelly, a nutrient-rich secretion that triggers the development of the sexual organs of the queen.
A queen larva sitting in a pool of royal jelly.
The Virgin Queen Emerges and Game of Thrones Ensues
After about 16 days, the first virgin queen hatches. Once she emerges, her first task is to locate any other unhatched queen cells and eliminate her competition by stinging and killing any rival queens still inside their cells. This ensures that she is the sole queen in the hive. You can actually hear this process happening in the hive as the virgin queen makes a unique, high-pitched noise called piping. If there are other unhatched queens in their cells, the piping can provoke them to respond with their own sounds, known as "quacking."
A worker bee feeding a young queen larva in a queen cup.
The Mating Flight
After killing off her rivals, the next crucial step for the virgin queen is her mating flight. A few days after emerging, she leaves the hive and flies to a Drone Congregation Area (DCA), a specific location where drones (male bees) from surrounding colonies gather. This area is often miles away from the hive. Once she arrives, the queen will mate with multiple drones—usually between 12 and 20, though some research cites up to 50—during a single flight. This ensures genetic diversity and provides her with enough sperm to fertilize eggs for the rest of her life, which can last several years.
The drones do not survive the mating process, as their reproductive organs detach inside of the queen and they fall backwards to their death after ejaculating. Once the queen has been successfully mated, she returns to her hive, ready to begin her role as the colony’s egg-layer.
A fully formed and capped queen cell.
A virgin queen successfully hatched from this queen cell. Can you see the clean opening at the bottom? It almost looks like a hinged door.
Back to the Hive
After her mating flights, the queen is ready to begin laying eggs. She moves methodically across the comb, inspecting each cell before laying. Using her antennae, she gauges the size of the cell to determine whether to fertilize the egg. If she chooses to fertilize the egg with stored sperm, it becomes a female worker bee. If she lays an unfertilized egg, it develops into a male drone. The queen can lay thousands of eggs daily, up to 2,000 each day during the peak season, carefully choosing whether to fertilize each one based on the time of year and overall needs of the collective colony. The queen can live up to 5 years, though I most commonly see them successfully reigning for about 2 years. Long live the Queen!