Life of a Carniolan Queen Bee

Carniolan Queen Bee is a big lady who dares to kill and spends her entire life to do nothing else than mating and laying eggs while well served and fed by the worker bees.

The metamorphosis of queen bees :

Before a female bee becomes a queen she will go through a metamorphosis from an egg to a stage of a mature queen which will occur in about 23 days. 


The phases include: egg - larva - capping of the queen cell - pupa - emerging pupa, virgin queen bee - nuptial flight - a mature queen bee ready to lay eggs.

In fact, those are the worker bees that make queens. 


After a queen bee has laid eggs in queen cups, the worker bees start to select which among all those larvae should be developed to be queens. 


They will then provide more quality food, which is the royal jelly, to those selected larvae. 


Although all larvae are fed with royal jelly at the beginning for several days, but only queen larvae will be fed continuously and exclusively. 


The rest of the larvae will become worker bees.

Queen bees are raised in very special constructed cells. 


Initially the eggs were placed in queen cups, as the larva emerge the worker bees then build it further to become a queen cell to exclusively feed the larva. 


The worker bees then will cap the queen cell with beeswax. In these cells larvae will develop into pupae. In about 7 - 10 days the pupa becomes a virgin queen bee and tries to emerge from the queen cell.

Upon maturity the virgin queen bee in her peanut-like cell will try to go out by chewing a circular opening on the cap cell made by the worker bees.


After most of the cap has been cut, the cap will eventually swing open resembling a hinged closure. With the presence of the virgin queen, the old mother queen will give way to the young virgin and voluntarily leave the hive with the primary swarm.

A virgin queen is a bit larger than most of the worker bees, but smaller than the mated laying queen.


In fact, a virgin queen is not easily distinguished when put together with the worker bees in a frame. She moves actively and can run across the honeycomb, scrambles over the workers and may even fly if she feels annoyed by the workers. 
You can frequently find a virgin queen hanging on the hive wall or corner.

The deadly queen competition :

As soon as a virgin queen bee emerges from her cell, she will look for other emerging queen bees with only one straight purpose, to kill them! 


As there are many virgin bees in a colony, with all of them having the same purpose, it is most likely that a war of virgin bees is about to happen.
 
Virgin bees do not just killed their direct rival virgin bees, but also the un-emerged virgin bee still occupying its cell.


You can often see an opened side of a queen cell with a dead pupa inside, indicating an assassination by another virgin queen.

When the swarm mode of a colony continues and the primary swarm has left the hive, the worker bees can temporarily hold the virgins fighting each other. Some virgins may leave and follow an after-swarm, while other virgins will stay and look for an opportunity to continue the deadly competition

At the end only one virgin remains who will become the new queen bee. If a primary swarm has both a new young queen and an old queen in the same time, the new queen will let the old queen to live and continue to lie down. 


After a few weeks the old queen will eventually die naturally and time has come for the young virgin to take over.

The nuptial flight :

This is an important phase of the queen bee where she mates with bee males and then land to start the new generation of a colony in a hive. 


The mating is typically carried out during a flight of the queen and male bees, hence called nuptial flight.
 
The mating should happen in a clear weather with the absence of rain which could be a trouble for flying insects. 


The queen starts to release pheromones to attract the males. However, after releasing the pheromone it often happens that the queen tries to escape the males letting only the fastest and fittest male bees to mate her. The mating will occur during the flight.

It is common that a queen will mate with a number of males and stores the sperm in a special organ in her abdomen which can last for her whole life. 


This sperm storage is good for about 20 years which can produce ten of millions fertilized eggs. 

The queen is now ready to lay eggs continuously and she totally becomes an egg laying machine to breed the younger bee generation. 


Oh, what a life of a queen bee. 

Magdy Elhalawany