The Dare to Kill Carniolan Queen Bee
Do not imagine a Carniolan queen bee as a beautiful,
charming and diligent lady. This queen we are going to talk about has really
the opposite of the above traits. A queen bee has nothing to do with beauty and
charm. She 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.
By: Uno Birawan
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.
