Queen bee

“ Sometimes they settle on a limb of a tree; and while they are there, they keep their queen covered, so no one can find her. They send out scouts to find a new home; and as soon as it is found, they all move the re.
"Sometimes Grandpa finds the queen, and puts her in the hive. Then she makes a sort of drumming noise, and the other bees follow her inside."
"Was it the queen bee that stung me?" asked Joyce.
"No, the queen never uses her sting except when in battle with another queen bee; but the other bees take care of her, even if they must die for her sake. ”

“ There is a lot about God mixed up with a Queen bee. Workers may only live five or six weeks, but a Queen may live five or six years. She is away bigger than a worker and she looks different. She is long and slender and has bigger wings, and she has a big abdomen ’cause she may lay a million or two eggs. She has only about half as many eyes as a worker, ’cause she only needs them when she goes out to find her lover, or maybe a few times more when she has a great hive full of one hundred and twenty pounds of honey and so many bees they are in each other’s way. ”

“ She descends from the azure heights and returns to the hive, trailing behind her, like an oriflamme, the unfolded entrails of her lover. Some writers pretend that the bees manifest great joy at this return so big with promise—Buchner, among others, giving a detailed account of it. I have many a time lain in wait for the queen-bee's return, and I confess that I have never noticed any unusual emotion except in the case of a young queen who had gone forth at the head of a swarm, and represented the unique hope of a newly founded and still empty city. ”

“ After she has made good her title to empire, the queen thinks about marriage; some warm day she will run out of the hive to see how the world looks, and especially to determine beyond doubt upon just what point of the universe her own hive is situated. The first flight of the queen bee is very pretty to see. ”

“ Of the queen bees there are three kinds, the black, the ruddy, and the variegated; though Menecrates, who is good authority, speaks only of the black and variegated. [1222] Aristotle, however, describes the reddish queen bee as the best. Even among the working insects there are two kinds, the smaller, in form round, and variegated in colour, the larger, which is the tame bee, less active and beautiful. The former, or wild bee, [1223] frequents the mountains, forests, and other solitary places, labours indefatigably, and collects honey in great quantities ”

“ The queen-bee is a model keeper at home, rarely leaving the hive. Most apiarians are interested at present in the habits and acclimatisation of the Ligurian bee—the Apis Ligustica, or Italian bee. It is found easy to substitute an Italian for a British queen, in a British hive which has been deprived of its native sovereign. The bees refuse to constitute themselves into a republic, and therefore they will accept even a foreign queen, who, no doubt, takes the oaths and obligations of the realm over which she is to reign. ”

“ The Queen is much more tenacious of life than any other bee, and may live to a great age. But one Queen exists in the same hive any great length of time. When there are more than one, the peculiar sound of each, as 55 explained in remarks on Rule 2, is heard by the other, which always results in a battle between them, or the issue of a swarm in the course of a day or two.
Bees, when placed in a dark room in the upper part of the house, or some out-house, are easily cultivated a short time with little trouble, and are sometimes made profitable to their owner ”

“ The Queen, or Parent Bee, is the soul of the community; to her all the rest are so attached, that they will follow her wherever she goes. She has the power of quelling any disturbance which may arise among her subjects by making a peculiar humming noise. She is so prolific as to lay fifteen or eighteen thousand eggs, which produce about eight hundred males or drones, four or five Queen Bees, and the rest Working Bees or Neuters. The combs of a hive consist of a number of cells, formed of wax, a substance which is secreted by the Working Bees after gorging themselves with honey. ”

“ It not unfrequently happens when the queen is prolific, and if it be an early season, that many eggs are wasted for want of unoccupied cells; for in that case the queen leaves them exposed at the bottom of the hive when they are greedily devoured by the bees. The queen-bee, unlike the great majority of her subjects, is a stayer at home; generally speaking, she only quits the hive twice in her life. ”

“ The queen, who is at once the mother and the mistress of the hive, differs, as Mr. Hunter has observed, from the royal chiefs of other insects, such as hornets, wasps and humble-bees; for the chiefs of these latter societies seem to work themselves into royalty, whereas the queen of the hive-bees reigns from her very birth. She is distinguishable from the rest of the society by her majestic movements, by the great length of her body, the proportional shortness of her wings, and her bent sting. ”

“ Whenever the honey-bees want to make a queen they know just how to do it. You know, a queen is a very important person. A bee queen is like an ant queen, not the ruler of a kingdom, but the mother of many, many children. Since a queen is a person of such note, she must have a larger room than an ordinary worker, so they set to work and tear down the partitions between two or three cells. When the egg in the large room hatches the white larva is fed bee jelly, just like the little worker larva, but it is never given any pollen or honey. ”

“ The queen-grub alone receives bee-milk, of a specially rich kind and in unlimited quantity, for the whole of her larval life. This “royal jelly,” as the old bee-masters termed it, is literally poured into the capacious queen-cell. For the whole five days of her existence as a larva she actually bathes in it up to the eyes. ”

“ She well knows she cannot live in a state subjected to a suffocating heat, amidst an overgrown population. So she leaves the royal cradle, impregnated with the royal larva, and withdraws from the hive, reluctantly, one may suppose, though accompanied by thousands of her subjects. The Queen-Bee leads the swarm to seek a place of comfort, and to establish another home, where not one cell nor drop of honey exists. ”

“ Now, how many of my readers understand the correct theory of taking all the bees of a colony for such work rather than only a part of it? Let me describe. Old bees will not and cannot rear good queens; they will commence cell-cups and complete queen-cells, but no strong queens will come from them.
Why is this so? Simply because old bees have passed from the stage of nurses to the sphere of honey and pollen-gatherers, or out-door workers. Old bees cannot prepare the proper food for nursing either worker or queen-bee larvae. ”

“ The queen honey-bee is a degenerate creature, unable to nourish herself or her young, to visit the flowers, build or store the comb; while the worker bee, apart from her normal infertility, still retains intact all the true female attributes of the ancestral solitary bees. In ants the very reverse of this is true: the queen is the perfect exemplar and embodiment of the species and has lost none of the primitive female attributes of independence and initiative, which she shares with the female bumble bees, solitary and social wasps. ”

“ It requires some experience to ferret out the queen from the bee-mob which seethes over the comb. The burly, big, bluntended drones are much more readily detected. However, after a little training in the devious ways of royalty one becomes expert in seeing that long, graceful, pointed body extending far back of the wings which characterises the queen. If the bees are not too much disturbed, she is likely to be surrounded by a rosette of workers, all with their faces toward her, for even in the court of the hive etiquette does not permit that the ladies-in-waiting turn their backs to the queen. ”

“ The frames containing the full comb are placed in this basket, the caps being shaved off. After several rapid revolutions the comb is found to be empty and is then returned to the hives to be refilled by the bees.
The queen bee is about one-third larger than the worker and is the mother and monarch of the hive. Queens are sometimes raised by bee-keepers for sale, especially by those who have an improved strain of a certain species, or a new and desirable species of bee. ”

“ A kind of an idea that one swarm, and occasionally two or three, are reared sometime in June, or fore part of summer, is about the extent of their reflections on the subject. Whether the drones deposit the eggs, or that a portion of the workers are females, and each raise a young one or two, or whether the "king bee" is the chap for laying eggs, is a matter beyond their ability to answer. It is but a few years since, that a correspondent of a Journal of Agriculture denied the existence of a queen bee, giving the best reasons he had, no doubt, that is, he had never seen one. ”

“ It is apparent that the irregular disposition of the cells is due to their being constructed so peculiarly by the larvæ. After the first brood, composed of workers, has come forth, the queen bee devotes her time principally to her duties at home, the workers supplying the colony with honey and pollen. As the queen continues prolific, more workers are added, and the nest is rapidly enlarged. ”

“ The accompanying illustration exhibits these three kinds of bees, namely, the Queen, the Drone, and the Worker, together with the cells which they respectively inhabit. Fig. 1 shows the queen-bee as she appears when in command of a hive. When she first issues from the royal cell, she is much smaller in the body, and an inexperienced observer might have some difficulty in distinguishing her from an ordinary worker. But any one who has been accustomed to bees can pick her out as soon as his eyes rest upon her. ”

“ It is probably not because of the queen herself, but of the future that she represents, that the bees show so great a devotion. For they are by no means sentimental; and should one of their number return to the hive so badly wounded that she will be unable to work again, they will unmercifully drive her away from the city. But for their mother they always show the same strong attachment. They will recognize her from among all; and even though she be old, crippled and forlorn, the guards at the gate will never allow another queen to enter the hive, however young and much needed she be. ”

“ When I was extensively engaged in rearing queen-bees, the call was for the leather-colored Italians—and very few of the light-colored queens were called for; now it seems to be the reverse, all queen-breeders are advertising the Golden Italian bees and queens.
The Holy Land and Cyprian bees seem to have gone out of fashion; so also the Albino. I see that the Carniolan race is not much advertised in the bee-papers any more. Well, I shall pin my faith to them for awhile yet, until I find something better. ”

“ They have now evidently discovered that their sovereign is gone; and the rapidity with which the bad news spreads through the hive, to the opposite side of the combs, is very remarkable. On replacing the queen in the hive, tranquillity is almost instantly restored. The bees, it is worthy of notice, recognize the individual person of their own queen. If another be palmed upon them, they seize and surround her, so that she is either suffocated, or perishes by hunger; for it is very remarkable, that the workers are never known to attack a queen bee with their stings. ”

“ She may have to supply from two thousand to three thousand brood-cells with eggs in the course of a single day, and she is for ever wandering through the crowded corridors of the hive looking for empty cradles. The old bee-masters believed that the queen was always accompanied in these unending promenades by exactly a dozen bees, whom they called the Twelve Apostles. It is true that whenever the queen stops in her march she is immediately surrounded by a number of bees, who form themselves into a ring, keeping their heads ceremoniously towards her. ”

“ That the old Queen accompanies the first swarm is established beyond a doubt; that many Queens are bred in a hive, a number sometimes exceeding thirty in one year, is also ascertained; and that the Bees have the power of producing a Queen from an egg deposited in the combs of the working Bees, by treating it in a different manner to those that are to become workers, has also been satisfactorily proved, all that has been said beyond this, regarding their natural history, must, I believe be considered principally conjecture. ”

“ They bring home dust of flowers, honey, and a kind of gum. The gum is to line the cells and to help make them strong.
If a queen bee dies, and all the baby queens are also dead, what can the bees do?
They take a baby work bee and make a queen. Can they not live if they have no queen? No, not long, there will be no eggs laid.
How do they make a queen of a work bee? They pick out a good grub. They put it into a round queen cell.
They feed the work grub the queen food, or “royal jelly.” When it grows up, it is not a work bee, but is a queen. ”

“ Queen Bees are readily distinguished by their larger size, being fully one-third longer than the common Bees, and are armed with a sting, which, however, they rarely use, except in combat with one another. ”