Queen bees are made, not born, and their feeding with royal jelly is the key to that process. Without this special food, queen bees would fail to develop properly. Royal jelly is a thick, extremely nutritious, milky-white, creamy liquid secreted by the hypopharyngeal glands of the nurse bees.
Queen bees live exclusively on royal jelly and it accounts for their incredible size and longevity.
They average 42 percent larger and weigh 60 percent more than the worker bee. Amazingly, they live 40 times longer than worker bees, seven years as compared to seven weeks. Biochemically speaking, royal jelly is very complex. It is a very rich source of proteins and contains eight essential amino acids, important fatty acids, sugars, sterols and phosphorous compounds as well as acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is needed to transmit nerve messages from cell to cell.