Apiology: The Study of Bees - Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - page 28

Not all of the eggs get fertilized. The unfertilized eggs become males or drones,
while the fertilized eggs become female worker bees. If a queen never mates or simply
never becomes fertile, all her eggs will become drones, and she should be replaced by
the beekeeper. A queen bee can live up to five years, but her egg production will begin
to drop off after two or three years. For this reason, most beekeepers must eventually
replace, or requeen, their hives. Requeening each year ensures that a hive has a young,
healthy queen; a strong queen, in turn, means a strong colony that generates maximum
honey production.
The queen bee has a stinger, but it is not barbed as a worker's. She is capable of
stinging repeatedly, but reserves her sting for desperate moments of combat with other
queens. She does not use it to defend the hive.
When we opened up Billy's hives, we observed several honeybees hanging around,
just flapping their wings. This behavior is known as fanning, and in addition to distrib-
uting the queen's pheromones, it circulates air in order to maintain the proper temper-
ature inside the hive. During brood rearing, the temperature of the brood nest is main-
tained at 90 to 95°F (32 to 35°C), even if the outside temperature is above 100°F or
below zero. Since worker bees metabolize honey to generate the heat needed to warm
the hive, honey must be present in the hive at all times.
The presence of a queen is essential to life in the hive. A colony will raise a new
queenforafewdifferentreasons:iftheexistingqueenisremovedoraccidentallykilled
by beekeeper's error, or lost on her mating flight, or if an older queen is failing and her
production of queen substance and egg laying declines.
Queens that are killed, removed, or lost will be replace by the colony with an emer-
gency queen. The colony will select a young fertilized egg or young worker larva that
is not more than three days old. This specially selected egg or larva will be in a worker-
sized cell that will be enlarged to a queen cup to accommodate the queen's larger body.
A failing queen will be replaced by an existing queen in a process called supersed-
ure. The queen will lay a fertilized egg in a queen cup. When the new queen emerges,
the old queen will be balled by the workers; a process in which the workers cluster
around the queen until she dies from overheating.
Queens reared by supersedure are usually stronger and better cared for than emer-
gency queens since they are not created in a panic and will receive larger quantities of
food (royal jelly) during development.
WORKERS
Worker bees are all female, and they comprise the largest group within the hive. They
are sexually undeveloped and do not lay eggs under normal hive conditions. However,