Honeybee_ Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - C. Marina Marchese [14]
BROOD NEST IN THE TYPICAL OVAL PATTERN
For the first three days of their lives as larvae, all female honeybees are fed a diet of royal jelly, a protein secretion made from the hypopharyngeal glands located in the heads of mature workers. However, during the remainder of the larval stage, and for the rest of their lives, only potential queens are continually fed royal jelly, while female workers and male drones begin feeding on pollen and nectar. Royal jelly is what enables queen bees to develop into sexually mature females.
On the seventh day of the larval stage, the queen larva transforms into a pupa, and at that time the worker bees will close the queen cell with a beeswax cap. The young queen emerges approximately sixteen days later by chewing a circular cut in the wall of her cell until the wall swings open like a door. A handful of worker bees become her attendants and spend the rest of their short lives feeding and grooming her, cleaning up her waste, and following her around the hive. The queen truly lives the life of royalty. She does not gather nectar or pollen, make honey, or even take care of her young. These are the jobs of the worker bees. As a matter of fact, the queen rarely leaves the hive except to mate with the male drones or to swarm.
QUEEN CUP
Within her first week, the newly emerged virgin queen leaves the hive for the very first time on what is called a nuptial flight. This dramatic event between the queen and drones from other hives happens in the air, well above the hive and the normal flight path of the worker bees. Drones gather in drone congregation areas. It is not known how these areas are decided upon, only that they are places away from the hive where the drones meet up and wait for a queen to fly by. The fastest drones are able to catch a queen and mate with her. To attract drones, the queen secretes a series of pheromones from her mandibular gland, called queen substance. The queen may mate with up to twenty drones. She makes only one mating flight in her lifetime, because that one flight gives her a lifetime supply of sperm. She stores the sperm in her spermatheca, her female reproductive organ that accepts and carries all the sperm. Upon returning to the hive, the queen begins laying eggs.
After she mates, the queen’s glands mature and become functional, giving off pheromones that regulate all the undertakings of the beehive. Pheromones are chemical messages, essential to honeybee communication, that trigger certain kinds of activities in the hive. The queen’s attendants distribute her pheromones to every bee in the hive by touching the workers around her with their antennae and by fanning their wings. These workers, in turn, touch the bees next to them and so on. The queen is the most important bee inside the hive, and each bee within the hive feels her influence. If a queen disappears or leaves the hive, it does not take long before her pheromones fade and the workers realize that their queen is missing.
LARVAE FLOATING IN ROYAL JELLY INSIDE THE BROOD NEST
During summer months, a queen lays an egg every twenty seconds, day and night, with a break every twenty minutes. She might lay as many as two thousand eggs per day—an amount that is approximately equal to her own weight. Healthy, productive queens lay an egg in almost every cell in the brood nest and leave just a few cells empty in between. This is considered a normal brood pattern. Eggs can be difficult for beginning beekeepers to spot; they look like small pieces of rice standing straight upright, and there should be only one inside each cell. In the larval stage the eggs look like shiny white worms curled into the shape of a “C” and floating in royal jelly. Once the cells are capped, the larvae spin a silky cocoon and straighten out again, becoming pupae. Cappings are the convex beeswax seals made by worker bees to