![]() Favorable weather, food supply and genetic programming stimulate her productivity. In the peak of the season, a queen will produce about 1,500 or more eggs per day. The ovaries are made up of about 370 thin tubes called ovarioles that produce eggs on a continuous basis. ![]() Once laying, queen bees in the wild produce about 150,000 eggs per year and depend upon two large ovaries that nearly fill her abdomen. These are often associated with geographical ‘edges.’ Tree lines near a field, bottoms of hills, openings in heavily wooded areas and the like. Mating occurs 50 to 150 feet off the ground, and are thus rarely seen by humans. ![]() DCAs may be located anywhere around an apiary, and can be found by careful tracking with helium balloons or kites or radar and lures containing queen pheromone. Queens and drones fly on warm and calm afternoons to Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs) where the queen is receptive to the many drones that follow the queen’s pheromone plume and dark form against the sky. Other bees are concerned with temperature stability to ensure proper queen development, wax secretion and cell building. Nurse bees are required for the production of royal jelly, the substance key to the development of new queens. The production of queen cells requires the contributions of many worker bees. There are three to nine supersedure cells produced in the average colony, and these cells may be located anywhere on the surface of the brood frame. Then several larvae are selected, their cells are enlarged, and peanut shaped queen cells are built on the surface of the comb. This happens when the queen’s pheromone and brood production drops to about half of its normal level. In Nature, old and inferior queens are replaced through a process called supersedure. Any shortage of sperm will not be corrected, and the fate of the queen, and her hive, is set. Once she begins laying eggs, the queen does not mate again. After several days of grooming and feeding by nurse bees inside the hive, the queen will start to lay eggs into worker cells which have been emptied and polished by the bees in the brood nest. After a week or so, the queen will make orientation flights, then mating flights, coupling with 12 to 20 different drones. Once a queen emerges from the cell, she will feed herself and is fed by nurse bees inside the hive. Some strains have shorter developmental times African queens are known to develop in just 14 days. ![]() Queen bees have the shortest developmental time, running 15.5 to 16 days from the time the egg is placed into the cell to the new queen’s emergence from her queen cell. Both queens and worker bees produce haploid bees. Worker bees are unable to mate and, in queenless and broodless situations, produce eggs with a single set of chromosomes. These eggs have two sets of chromosomes, making them diploid individuals. Queens and worker bees develop from apparently identical eggs that are deposited into cells by their mother queen following successful mating with multiple drones. Queens are one of two female castes of bees found inside the hive, the other caste being the worker bees. Both open and sealed brood influence worker bee behavior. She also produces eggs that hatch into larvae and pupae. These decisions are based on chemical information (feedback) the bees receive from the body of the queen. Queen feeding, waste removal, and her eventual supersedure replacement are all the results of the collaborative decision-making nature of worker bees. In fact, the queen is chemically reactive to the needs of the entire colony. ![]() New beekeepers often assume that the queen bee is in charge inside the hive, but she has no such power. There may be a link between the number of eggs a queen lays and the amount of these chemicals she produces. She produces odors, chemical signals called pheromones and which we also call the ‘queen substance’ or ‘queen signal’. Worker bees feed and groom the queen, as well as take care of her waste products. The queen is sexually active during the early part of her life, mating with multiple drones before spending the rest of her life laying eggs. This queen is a female bee that has been selected by her sister bees and is the only female bee that is fully reproductive. When everything is working in a colony there is usually just one queen bee. Here we look at the activities of queen bees. Before obtaining the first bee colony, the future sustainable apiculturist must master key aspects of bee biology. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |