The Queen Bee

Written By Celeste Bauer

You’ve all heard the expression “the queen bee” referring to someone who is in charge with implicit qualities of strength. But what makes a queen bee a queen? How are we changing the process? And is it for better or worse?
 
Naturally when bees are born they feed on royal jelly for the first three days and then they feed on beebread, but queen bees receive royal jelly for their entire larva state. Once a queen bee is born she goes around and stings the rest of the queen larva so she is the only queen bee. When queens are reared in a lab they are grafted, that is, the larva of a worker cell in a breeder’s beehive is transferred to an artificial queen cell. One research paper compared the resulting queen bee’s hives absconding tendency (colony collapse syndrome), brood area, honey harvest, mite infestation, and swarming tendency to that of naturally reared queen bees. This study showed that the grafted queens, on average, resulted with larger brood area and honey harvest and with a smaller swarming tendency (which can be considered both a good thing and bad thing), absconding tendency, and mite infestation. (Note: the queen bees in this study were inseminated by a contained and manipulated swarm.)
 
The second critical part of a queen bee’s life cycle is their insemination. Naturally queen bees have a swarm after birth where hundreds of drones (male bees) inseminate her. In labs, queen bees are artificially inseminated with one type of sperm. The natural process results in a higher genetic diversity which, based on theories like Darwinism, natural selection, and the theory of evolution, results in the stronger genetic bees becoming more predominate. This is why some scientists think this could help solve the bee mite problem that is arising and contributing to the bee population decline. Similarly, in nature, only the toughest queens survive to take over the colony. All of this helps to produce bees that are stronger and less likely to die from disease.  In addition, when bees swarm, all of the drones that mate with the queen die. This helps alleviate the burden of the drones on the hive because they serve very little purpose other then that.
 
This directly pertains to the ‘wicked’ bee problem we have been discussing in class. Stronger bees mean stronger hives that are able to withstand disease and, ultimately, not only survive through the years but also thrive. If we manifest a way to breed stronger queen bees that yield a stronger hive, the outcome could contribute to helping solve the decline in bees that we are seeing globally.
 
Sources:
http://www.entomoljournal.com/vol3Issue2/pdf/3-2-11.1.pdf
http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Natural_vs._artificial_bee_reproduction/
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/12/decision-making-bee-swarms-mimics-brains