Kids: Queen bees and wanna-bees?
Photo: Flickr user Tie Guy II
When a bee colony loses a queen – say, she’s accidentally killed – the worker bees notice the absence of a chemical she produces called a “pheromone.”
In response to the absence of the queen’s scent, the workers begin a process of “emergency queen rearing.” They start building queen-size rearing chambers for about ten to twenty young female larvae. The process of royal succession is similar if the queen is dying of old age. As she ages, the queen produces less pheromones. The decline in pheromone concentration signals the workers to start building queen-size cells.
The queen herself lays the eggs of her potential “princess” successors into these cells. Ordinarily, these eggs would hatch into female larvae who would grow up as workers. But since they’re inside special larger, vertically-oriented cells, the workers know to feed these princesses a special food called “royal jelly.” This diet creates a fertile queen rather than a sterile worker.
The first queen to emerge from her cell as an adult will sting the other developing queens to death in their cells before they hatch. If two should emerge at the same time, then the rival queens will have a battle to the death.
