Suzy is half right here. The queen can sting and sting and sting. BUT, apart from her one and only mating flight, the queen (honey bee) doesn't leave the hive by herself. The only other time she leaves is if the hive gets overcrowded in which case she will take about half of the bees with her as a swarm, which I already wrote about the other day. In a swarm, she will be in the middle as it is her pheromones that keep the swarm together, and so she won't be stinging anything.
The reason why the queen can sting and sting is because if the worker bees decide to build queen cells, and feed the larvae accordingly so they develop as young queens instead of workers, the old queen will sting the nearly developed queen in her cocoon before she hatches. Simplifying it, usually the only time a queen cell will be able to produce a living queen is after the original queen has left with a swarm. Sometimes then two or three will hatch at much the same time and scrap it out between them as only one will survive. If anything should happen to the old queen, so long as there are newly laid eggs in the hive, the queenless state of the hive will trigger the workers into producing queen cells. Within three weeks a new queen should hatch, but she then has to fly out and find and mate with drone bees before she can return and start laying. As the fully developed bees only live for about six weeks in summer, this means that practically a whole generation is lost, so beekeepers are very careful with their queens. Jacquie To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
