Queen bee

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The queen bee (center) with her "court"

The Queen Bee , also Weisel or floor mother called, is the only sexually mature female animal in the people of the honey bee . Compared to those of the two other phenotypes, drone and worker, their abdomen is significantly longer and increases slightly in volume over the course of life. Several fully developed egg tubes ( ovaries ) are present in this. The function of the queen consists of laying eggs and pheromonic control of hive life in order to preserve the beehive. Like the workers, the queen also has a sting , but only uses it to kill rivals before the wedding flight .

Emergence

Queen bees are used when the bee colony splits over swarming , or when the previous queen has died or is replaced for reasons of age (lack of pheromones); the latter is called replication.

Like worker bees, development takes place from fertilized eggs. The young queens are initially common sisters of the worker bees and up to 75% related to them.

In contrast to the larvae of the workers , queens are nourished for the entire duration of the larval stage with a fodder juice produced by the nurse bees in special head glands, the royal jelly, and raised in their own vertically (instead of horizontally) aligned queen cells . These are either created by the hive bees on the honeycomb through remodeling (replenishment cells), or attached to the lower edges of the honeycomb (swarm cells). The decision to produce new queens is made by the worker bees if the concentration of certain pheromones falls below a certain limit value. The process usually occurs with strong growth of the colonies or with defective queen.

In evolutionary terms, this behavior is explained in such a way that rearing a new queen is the only possibility for the (sterile) workers to transport their own gene pool into the next generation. The empirically established altruism of women workers is also explained in this way.

Comparison of development times of the honey bee
queen Worker drone
Egg ( "pen" ) fertilized fertilized unfertilized
gender Venus symbol.svg Female Venus symbol.svg Female Female (801864) - The Noun Project.svg male
Genome diploid diploid haploid
Storage in Queen wells Worker cell Drone cell
feeding Queen or
royal jelly
Worker
feed juice later compound feed
Drone feed juice
Development time
  • egg   • 3 days   • 3 days   • 3 days
  • larva   • 5 days   • 6 days   • 7 days
  • Doll   • 8 days   • 12 days   • 14 days
  (in total)     16 days     21 days     24 days
Hatching weight about 200 mg about 100 mg about 200 mg
body length 18-22 mm 12-15 mm 15-17 mm
Puberty about 7 days about 14 days
lifespan 3-4 years 4–7 months (in winter)
2–6 weeks (in summer)
1-3 months

Mating and lifetime

Queen bee that has just mated with the genitals of the last drone broken off

Young queens fly out once or several times when they are one to two weeks old to mate with up to 12 drones . On these wedding flights at so-called drone collection points , they pick up the seeds of the drones in their seminal vesicles. This is sufficient for a lifetime of up to four years. If the seed supply runs out, the queen lays more and more unfertilized eggs, from which drones develop. During the growing season, when fresh brood is available, such a queen is replaced by the colony with new generation.

The queen mates with several drones from different races on the wedding flight. Since she receives mixed sperm, her diploid offspring, the workers of a people, break down into different lineages, the so-called fractions. This means that the workers of different factions are not 75% related to each other and therefore have slightly different behavioral characteristics, which gives the bee colony a higher level of fitness than would be possible if the queen was mated with just one single drone. For example, certain fractions can react better to conditions than other fractions, depending on which genes that affect their behavior.

Laying performance

The colony strength of a bee colony fluctuates over the course of the year. In the bees of the temperate climatic regions it has its minimum in early spring and reaches its maximum around the solstice . In the individual strong breeds of the western honeybee , z. B. the Buckfast bee , that can be 50,000 animals. At the appropriate time, the queen begins laying eggs after a winter break, when 10 degrees and more has been reached on three consecutive days, usually around mid / end of February (northern hemisphere), and reaches peak values ​​of up to 2000 eggs towards the end of May a day - more than their own body weight.

Pheromone source

Chemical structural formula of the pheromone ( E ) -9-oxodec-2-enoic acid ("queen substance")

In addition to her main task, laying eggs during the growing season, the queen releases what is known as the queen substance through her mandibles . This contains a pheromone that inhibits the sexuality of the other females, the worker bees, and ensures the well-being of the entire insect state.

So the bees notice z. B. the lack of these pheromones within a short time that their queen has died or was lost due to beekeeping . If this happens at a time when the brood is present, the bees start to convert some brood cells from young worker larvae to queen cells and to bring in new queens to replace them with the other diet ("replenishment").

Drone and humpback brooding

Eggs laid by an anal moss. It is noticeable that the eggs are not in the middle of the cell floor and one cell is double-pinned.

The loss of the queen outside the actual breeding season is a threat to a colony of bees. In such a case there is either no brood at all, so that a new queen could not be created, or a young queen could be drawn from the brood, but this was not mated due to the lack of drones or suitable environmental conditions for the wedding flight. In the first case, after a while, some worker bees, so-called anal weasels , begin to lay eggs ( humpback brood or humpback brood ). In the second case, the young queen lays only unfertilized eggs after usually three to four weeks ( drone brood ). The latter also occurs when the old queen lacks sperm or when she is ill. In both cases, only drone brood (male parthenogenesis ) occurs in sometimes larger quantities, which then causes the bee colony to perish due to the lack of colony renewal - i.e. the lack of diploid workers. In beekeeping, such a colony can sometimes be saved by removing the old queen, if any, and inserting a young queen, but this intervention is seldom successful because numerous boundary conditions have to be observed and also the acceptance of the pheromones of the queen by the workers plays a role.

The cape bee Am capensis is an exception . If the original queen is missing, after about three days a few workers begin to lay unfertilized eggs, which then - and this is what is special - predominantly workers (female parthenogenesis ). Queens can even be raised from these eggs again. However, this possibility does not prevail as an ordinary possibility of reproduction, since parthenogenesis is associated with evolutionary disadvantages in the medium term.

Hatch year mark

For various reasons, especially to determine the age and quick identification in the beehive, beekeepers occasionally mark their young queens with a glued-on, sometimes numbered, opalithic color plate, drawing paint or pencil on the back armor ( opalith means opal stone).

The annual colors are internationally uniform and are repeated every five years in the same order, starting with the color white. The queen is marked by briefly removing it from the beehive and locking it in a holding device. A plunger coated with cotton wool is used to reduce the space for the queen, thereby holding her in place in the narrow opening at the top of the marking device. So the beekeeper can label the insect and after a short drying process let it back into the colony. Commercially available plates sometimes contain tiny printed numbers. A non-toxic glue is used to fix it.

Queen marked with a white plate (for 2006)
Year markings queen bees
White yellow red green blue
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
2026 2027 2028 2029 2030

Notes on the year markers:

  • "White, yellow and red the roses green against a blue sky"
  • "Will You Raise Good Bees" (white, yellow, red, green, blue)

art

The queen bee, the bee colony and honey play an important role in Joseph Beuys' work . The honey partly stands for its symbolic effect for the social structures within the bee state as well as for the substance of the thoughts.

A fairy tale is entitled The Queen Bee .

In the political and religious imagery of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the (male) king bee presides over the ideal (bee) state.

See also

literature

  • Fert Gilles, Klaus Nowottnick: Königinnenzucht , Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz 2013, ISBN 978-3-7020-1400-1 .
  • Edmund Herold, Karl Weiß: New Beekeeping School , Ehrenwirth Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-431-02739-3 .
  • Josef Herold, Hubert Pieterek: Das kleine Beekeeper-ABC , Ehrenwirth Verlag, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-431-02668-0 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Queen bee  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Queen Bee  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Buckelbrut ( Memento from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) , Beekeeper ABC, accessed June 12, 2014.
  2. Friedrich Ruttner: Natural history of honey bees. (Biology, social life, species and distribution). 2nd Edition. Kosmos, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-440-09477-4 .
  3. Meinolf Schumacher : Maja's ancestors? About bees in medieval literature . In: Bonsels' animal life. Insects and reptiles in children's and youth media , ed. by Petra Josting u. Sebastian Schmideler. Schneider, Baltmannsweiler 2015. ISBN 978-3-8340-1518-1 , pp. 293–308, here pp. 300–302 (digitized version ) .