Hobbies And Interests
Preparation
The special cell in which a queen bee matures looks like a vertical peanut, allowing her to grown a much larger abdomen than an ordinary worker bee. That extra space for eggs is one of the ways she is recognized by her swarm and inaugurated as queen when the time comes. Meanwhile, she feeds on a special royal jelly that allows her to grow into a queen, with reproduction capabilities unlike any of the other bees. Without a queen, they might all start laying eggs, frantically, but the eggs would be unproductive. The queen is the only one with fully operational ovaries.
Process
Before the queen bee can lay her eggs, male drones from other colonies must fertilize them. To achieve this, she waits until her wings are fully formed and very strong. Then she takes her mating flight, sometimes as much as 30 miles high above her colony. She may mate with as many as 10 different drones, each of whom leaves his sex organ inside her and dies. A queen bee mates only once in her lifetime and carries the sperm, separately, inside her for as many as five years of productive egg-laying.
Volume
A healthy queen will lay from 1,500 to 2,000 eggs every day. Each egg must have its own clean cell to produce a bee. Unfertilized eggs will turn into drones. Fertilized eggs become the workers. The large volume of eggs insures that honey lovers will have plenty, and that the hive will stay healthy and replenished.
The Changing of the Queen
The natural life cycle of a queen bee is five or six years. Most beekeepers, however, will not let a queen live that long. The younger the queen, the more eggs she will lay. A commercial hive needs to have a new queen every one to three years to stay at top production. Left to their own devices, the bees themselves get rid of an aging queen once she stops being productive, crowning a new queen to carry on their species.