The honeybee colony functions as a single biological unit, often described as a superorganism, where no individual bee can survive long-term alone. Within this collective, the queen is the central, specialized reproductive figure, acting as the sole source of new life for the entire hive. Her role is not that of a ruler issuing commands, but rather a dedicated production factory whose output dictates the colony’s health and behavior. The necessity of the queen extends beyond simply laying eggs, encompassing the chemical regulation of the thousands of worker bees. This complex interdependence demonstrates why the social structure of a honeybee colony relies on the presence of a single, healthy queen.
Maintaining the Colony Population
The queen’s primary function is to ensure the continuous replenishment of the worker bee population, which constantly faces attrition due to a short lifespan. During the active season, a worker bee may only live for about five to seven weeks due to the high energy demands of foraging and hive maintenance. To offset this rapid turnover, a productive queen must lay a large volume of eggs daily.
At her peak, a healthy queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs each day, an output that often exceeds her own body weight in a 24-hour period. This continuous input of new brood allows the colony to maintain a population that can swell to over 60,000 individuals during the summer flow.
The queen also controls the sex of her offspring through a biological mechanism. As she lays an egg, she can choose to fertilize it with stored sperm, resulting in a female worker bee or a future queen. If she chooses not to fertilize the egg, it develops into a male drone bee. This ability to selectively produce workers and drones ensures the colony’s demographic needs are matched to the demands of the season.
Regulating Worker Behavior Through Pheromones
While egg-laying is essential, the queen’s influence on the colony is exerted through chemical communication, primarily via pheromones. The most widely recognized of these chemical signals is Queen Mandibular Pheromone (QMP), a blend of at least five major compounds produced in her mandibular glands. This blend acts as a cohesive signal, announcing her presence and reproductive status to every bee in the hive.
QMP is distributed throughout the colony as worker bees feed and groom the queen, a process known as trophallaxis, where food and pheromones are exchanged mouth-to-mouth. Once distributed, the pheromone affects worker physiology and behavior. One of its main functions is to suppress the development of worker bee ovaries, ensuring that the workers remain functionally sterile.
Without this chemical inhibition, worker bees might begin laying unfertilized eggs, which hatch into drones, leading to the collapse of the social structure. The pheromone also influences general hive activities, mediating the attraction of attendants who care for the queen and regulating worker tasks like wax secretion and foraging behavior. A decline in the pheromone blend signals to the workers that the queen is aging or failing, triggering a response to replace her.
Queen Replacement
The necessity of the queen becomes evident when her pheromone output declines or she is suddenly lost from the hive. When workers detect the reduction or absence of QMP, their behavior changes, exhibiting distress and activating emergency replacement procedures. This decline in the chemical signal, rather than a drop in egg-laying, is the primary trigger for the workers to initiate the rearing of a replacement.
The colony can attempt to replace a queen in two main ways: supersedure or emergency queen rearing. Supersedure is a planned replacement, usually occurring when an aging queen’s pheromones are gradually failing. The colony builds one to three new queen cells on the face of the comb. The old queen may continue laying eggs while the new queen develops, sometimes resulting in a brief period where mother and daughter queens coexist.
Emergency queen rearing occurs when the queen is suddenly lost or killed. Workers select several young larvae or eggs that were originally destined to become workers, rapidly modify their cells into queen cells, and feed them exclusively on royal jelly. If the colony does not have larvae of the correct age—less than three days old—to convert, or if the process fails, the colony will become permanently queenless. This leads to its eventual demise as the population of older workers naturally dies off without new recruits.