Talk:Queen bee

message: This article describes recent findings according to which it is not the presence of royal jelly in the diet that makes a bee a queen, but the absence of honey and pollen in her diet:
"It turns out, it’s the other way around. Not feeding an immature queen pollen and honey is what makes her royal, not her exclusive access to royal jelly."
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/royal-jelly-isnt-makes-queen-bee-queen-bee/
Hopefully someone with expert knowledge can verify/update this (I just happened to find it, and am by no means knowledgeable enough to verify it).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.52.7.11 (talk) 02:24, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Queen bee nutrition

message: References -
The link for "Bees Gone Wild" takes you to a site advertising building your own web site, which must be in error.  Do you mean the Bees Gone Wild Apiaries, in Derry, PA?  If so the link should be: http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeod3nx/id1.html
As a side issue, I'd like to find a link, article, or publication dealing with how to retrieve the queen from a swarm that has left the hive and taken up residence elsewhere.  This must be a very specialized, difficult thing to do.  There is a brief portion in this video that describes someone who rescues a swarm (queen plus workers who have swarmed with her)and sets up a new hive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekoeQodrVoM
but it doesn't give much information.
Thanks.  M.W.MW (talk) 14:20, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled I

message: I have actually heard the piping of queen bees. It sounds like the peep of a peeper frog or the sound of a rather high-pitched whistle or harmonica.
Research in the 60s (?) indicated that the body of the queen produces a hormone that inhibits queen-rearing behavior on the part of worker bees.  She can only produce a certain amount. So the more bees there are in a colony the lower the concentration of this hormone. When it falls below a critical value, then the queen-rearing behavior is released for normal swarming. Should the queen be killed the concentration of the hormone falls quickly to zero and the workers select several of the recently laid eggs to rear as queens.
I think that the article should reflect this fact.
----
Who will be first to fill in the taxonomy? RedWolf 06:20, Nov 27, 2003 (UTC)
Surely there is an article on the honeybee. Presumably the taxonomy stuff would go there.
Patrick0Moran 07:18, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled II

message: I'm looking for information on bees. I found the information about one aspect of the bee colony, ie the queen scattered around on four seperate page entitled 
#Queen bee
#Virgin queen (with a disambig. from Elizabeth I of England)
#Piping queens (describing the noise angry females of the species make) 
#Supersedure (describing the process by which one queen replaces another)
Why spread all this stuff around when it can be neatly and conveniently placed in one article? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. Anyone looking up bees wants the info in one place. To have different articles for hives, swarms, piping queens etc etc etc is superfluous. 
I'm not suggesting that any of the information is superfluous, just the superfluity of seperate articles.
If anyone objects, they can put it all back. I'll leave the other pages where they are for a few days, but will transfer any discussion pertaining to the other three topics listed above to this page. Unfortunately, the history of the editting will be lost.
--Amandajm 07:50, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incorporating other articles into this article 

message: :The piping sound is a G sharp or A natural.
Couldn't this vary from species to species? (A larger queen might produce a lower note, for instance?) - furrykef (Talk at me) 21:31, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Piping note

message: I understand to be called raw, honey must not be heated above a certain temperature.  I don't know what those limits are, but I am under the impression it has something to do with destroying enzymes in the honey.  Does anyone know the limits?
transferred by --Amandajm 07:54, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I found an article on the net here which gives some temperatures (in Fahrenheit) to match the temperature in a honey super in Summer. Honey in storage does (mine does) crystalize over time, and when you need to bottle some more it helps to have a honey heater to bring it back to liquid form. Sting au Buzz Me... 22:37, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maximum temperature for Raw Honey 

message: These histories are inactive, but at least reveal who has contributed to the articles.
--Amandajm 08:10, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Moving of histories

message: The article indicates that a virgin queen will kill potential rivals by stinging them.  But I had heard that queens have no stingers - that part having been modified for egg laying.  So do they sting, or possibly bite their rivals?
Paul 
epalb@honey.email.ne.jp
: Whoever told you that queens have no stingers was incorrect.  I can't speak for every species of bee but honeybee queens certainly have stingers.  It is part of the ovipositor but that does not preclude it's use as a stinger.  It is different from the worker bee's stinger in that it is smooth instead of barbed but that's about it.  Rossami (talk) 20:07, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That reminds me of someone who confidently told me on the basis of his own experience that carpenter bees do not have stingers. I caught a female carpenter bee and identified a very large and efficient looking stinger. I told my friend that he probably had been playing with a drone.  P0M 21:40, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Virgin Queens sting rivals 

message: The last time I read anything in book form on the subject it was affirmed that the pheromone that workers lick from the body of the queen not only inhibits workers from laying eggs, but it also inhibits them from making queen cells.  If the queen dies or the population grows so large that the pheromone is too diluted by the time it is shared out among all the bees, then workers will start to make queen cells.  Have researchers revised this finding? P0M 21:40, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Question about "queen substance" 

message: There are a lot of interjections in this article about beekeeping - I imagine that a lot of the editing of this article is done by beekeepers.  However, I think it somewhat distracts from the flow of the article.  Tiki2099 (talk) 22:53, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Beekeeping?

message: I saw a documentary on bees that stated how if a worker bee lays an egg and the queen discovers it, by detection of pheromones on the egg, she will kill the egg and also the bee that laid it. I was wondering if anyone has a reference for this behaviour by the queen bee. It seems like something that should be included in the article. Alialiac (talk) 06:50, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Queen killing worker bees? 

message: Supersedure cells (including insurance cups) are formed while the original queen is still alive and possibly still laying. Emergency cells are created when there is "no" queen. Additionally, "balling" is not the only method a previous queens are deposed. Old queens often produce insufficient pheromones, so the attendant bees stop feeding them - and in turn they dies of starvation.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.87.238.194 (talk) 15:06, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Supersedure ≠ Emergency cell 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I read this article a few years ago. Since then a few things were changed and added. Some of the stuff I read is incorrect.
1. "All of the healthy male bees mate with the queen, and she spends the warm season laying eggs."
It'a not true that all drones mate with the queen. The strongest and at most 20 of them mate with the queen. Also, the queen does not mate with her own drones, something that is not clear in the article.
2. "Eggs that are strong and up to the queen bee's standards are given extra hormones, and are put into what are known as "queen cups" for further development. There will be several eggs dosed with the queen pheromones, but only one will grow strong enough to hatch."
Eggs are not fed hormones. They are fed royal jelly if the eggs need to turn into queens. Also, eggs are not moved/put into queen cups. Queen cups are built around the regular fertilized eggs.
3. "When the new queen is born, the old queen flies away from the hive like the male bees, and dies."
This is not true because the queen that flies away settles with about half of the colony she was leading into a new place and continues to lead the colony until she is replaced. The queen does not automatically die after swarming.
4. "As many as 21 virgin queens have been counted in a single large swarm.[citation needed]"
Unless somebody provides a source this smells to me like nonsense that should be removed.
5. "The queens of Africanized bees produce more vigorous and frequent bouts of piping.[citation needed]"
Unless somebody provides a source this smells to me like nonsense that should be removed.
6. "Thelytoky occurs in the Cape bee, Apis mellifera capensis, and has been found in other strains at very low frequency."
This is true and "less than 1% of worker-laid eggs are diploid in other honey bee races" (see https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/IN/IN91600.pdf).
7. "Although the name might imply it, a queen bee does not directly control the hive. Her sole function is to serve as the reproducer."
This is not true because the queen does a lot of work with pheromones in order to direct the colony and balance/assign tasks to worker bees based on the needs of the colony (see http://vri.cz/docs/vetmed/56-6-265.pdf). It can be argued that the queen works harder than the worker bees. In fact, "workers spend more time resting and patrolling the nest than they do anything else." (see https://americanbeejournal.com/the-tasks-of-a-worker-honey-bee).
ICE77 (talk) 07:33, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the comments. It's been lying around a while, and most were already taken care of - I took the liberty to address the last few comments that you left. effeietsanders 21:42, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nonsense, corrections and additions 

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thread_title:  Featured picture scheduled for POTD 

message: The replacement of an aging queen is discussed but not its life expectancy… Some sites say 1-2 years, some longer time periods. I suppose this depends on species and climate? David.Monniaux (talk) 08:08, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Life expectancy?