The Emergence of the Queen Without getting over technical, the queen bees emerge days sooner than the same bees would IF they were left as workers. This comes from a solid feeding of Royal Jelly, a glandular secretion fed to the queen by workers during her larva stage. The new queens are tended to by nearly all the colonies bees at one time or another, this touching of the queens allows her scent, known as a pheromone to pass from bee to bee, aiding them in smooth and logical understanding of their duties. It can not be emphasized enough that pheromones control positive communication throughout the hive. A dead queen is sure doom to the hive and their attitude promotes even faster decline.
Workers stumble around with no clear idea of what their duties are without the queens scent.
Of course, they have enough instinctual sense to create a new queen if there are eggs or young larva to work with. If not, the hive will likely perish at the end of the season. After escaping her peanut shaped cell the queen is cleaned and cared for by a rotating group of worker bees called the queens court. Again, the court is a small collection of the many thousand of bees that live in the hive. But just before they become foragers a 3 weeks of age, the spend time doing housekeeping duties, including tending to the queen.