People often assume that the queen bee is the boss of a beehive, but it turns out that many of the decisions are actually made by worker bees.
For example, when the queen lays eggs, she can decide the gender of each egg. If she lays an egg containing genetic material from both her and the father, then the offspring will be female, but if she lays an egg containing just her own genetic material, then the offspring will be male. But while the queen can control the gender of each egg, she doesn’t actually get to decide, as it all depends on the size of the cells she finds in the honeycomb.
Before she lays an egg, the queen first measures the size of the honeycomb cell with her front legs. Large cells get a male egg and smaller cells get a female egg. But it’s the workers who build the honeycomb cells; it’s actually the workers who are controlling the whole process.
The ratio of males to females remains fairly constant in most hives and this ratio is also maintained by the workers. This ratio is important as males do no work, so they are just more mouths to feed, so their numbers are closely monitored.
During the queen’s reign, nurse bees constantly attend to her, but while they are doing this, they also pick up her scent, which provides valuable information about her health. This is then passed to other bees, so the hive is constantly up to date about the queen’s health. But it turns out the queen’s loyal subjects aren’t that big on the loyalty bit, as if they detect any decline in the queen’s health, then the workers begin raising potential replacement queens.
If a new queen emerges, the old queen doesn’t get long to enjoy her retirement, as she is surrounded by workers, who use their wing muscles to generate heat, and they cook the old queen to death. It seems a bit harsh, but it does at least resolve any potential disputes about who is in charge. The new queen is probably left wondering what happened to her Mum, but fortunately, she never seems to connect the dots and is happy to start her new reign.
Apparently, some beekeepers used to use this process to replace the queen if their honey yield is down. Rather than physically replacing the queen, they would just chop off one of her front legs. The queen’s front legs are a vital part of the egg-laying process, as the queen uses them to measure the size of the cells, so the worker bees quickly spot the defect, raise a new queen, cook the old one, and life in the hive continues with a new healthy queen.
The workers usually raise multiple potential new queens so they have a backup, but if 2 potential queens emerge at the same time, then the leadership contest is quickly resolved with a fight to the death. While worker bees have barbs on their stings (which is why they often die when they sting humans, as the barb gets stuck in the thick skin), queens have evolved stingers with no barbs, which allows them to sting multiple times, and this means they can quickly kill off any challengers.
But new queens do at least try to avoid having to kill their own sisters, so the first queen to emerge emits a warning ‘toot’. This warns other emerging princesses and they respond with a ‘quack’. The quacking princesses then delay their emergence until after the tooting queen has either successfully departed in a swarm or been selected for ‘retirement’.
So in many respects, a beehive is more of an autonomous collective, with workers contributing to many of the decisions, and it somehow seems to work even with 30 to 50 thousand bees in a hive.
