Saturday 7 January 2012

Queen Honey Bee



As everyone knows, Honey Bees live in colonies composed of one Queen, a few Drones (male bees whose only function is to fertilize the Queen), and Workers, which are sterile females and do basically all the hard work in the colony, from finding food, to producing honey, wax and a special substance called Royal Jelly which is produced by a special gland in the Worker's head.
Royal Jelly is a highly nutritious food and is fed to the Queen and to all developing larvae in the colony. However, when the Queen starts growing old and its reproductive power diminishes, the Workers select a few larvae, take them to special cells away from the others and start feeding them with huge amounts of Royal Jelly. This causes them to develop into fertile Queen Bees. Once they reach a certain age, thliste future Queen Bees pupate (they build themselves a cocoon and undergo a metamorphosis into an adult bee).





However, there can only be one Queen in the colony, so the first Queen Bee to be born immediately finds the other Queens and stings them to death before they emerge. If two or more Queens emerge at the same time, there will be a vicious battle between them until one has killed all others. When this happens, the Worker bees will kill the old, original Queen and the new, young one will take its place. Life is not so sweet for a bee after all, is it? All bees in a colony are born from the same Queen and therefore siblings, that's why they occupy number 3 in this

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