it is not surprising that when the hive queen dies, the entire colony, often numbering 100,000 bees, is in temporary chaos.
The queen bee releases chemical signals that stop egg layers bees from working, but shortly after her death, these chemical signals fade, which means that working bees can lay eggs, and the highly efficient hive system is disrupted.
The role of the Queen Bee in the hive.
The most important job of a hive queen, who lives for up to five years, is to lay eggs. It can lay up to 1500 eggs a day and put one egg in each cell if it works productively.
While the queen is central to everything that happens within the hive, it is - contrary to popular belief - that it does not control the colony. In fact, thousands of working bees control the queen. They can kill the Queen of the hive and raise a new one whenever they wish. Some beekeepers replace the Queen Bee every year to maintain a strong colony.
Find a new queen bee
The most common causes of the sudden death of a queen are illness, a predator attack, or a beekeeper’s fault. When the Queen Bee dies, she is suddenly confused, but the colony works quickly to raise a new one.
Typically, workers find eggs or larvae less than three days old and harbor them in specially built and vertically suspended "royal cells". It takes about three days for fertilized eggs to hatch. Larvae are fed with royal jelly. After about eight days, the new queen of the cell appears, makes wedding trips, mates in the air with male bees, and tries to kill other virgin queens. Then the last remaining queen of the bee begins to lay eggs. The process from losing the Queen to the egg stage takes about 29 days.
A colony without a queen.
The worst-case scenario after the queen’s death is that the worker bees do not succeed in raising a new queen. The Queenless colony could not last for long. The lack of a bee queen affects the behavior of working bees, which makes them troubled or aggressive.
The worker bees may lay eggs, but because they are not fertilized, all eggs are male. Since male bees do not collect any food or do any work, the number of productive bees decreases until the colony disappears. The entire colony may become stressful and prone to pests or diseases. The only way for beekeepers to save a colony without a queen is to introduce a new queen from outside the hive.
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