Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Butler may have misinterpreted the queen's function when he found queenless colonies sometimes develop eggs laid by "laying workers", however there is no doubt he saw the queen as an Amazonian ruler of the hive. As an influential beekeeper and author, his assertion that drones are male and workers female, was quickly accepted.
Multiple eggs per cell are not an absolute sign of a laying worker because when a newly mated queen begins laying, she may lay more than one egg per cell. Egg position Egg position in the cell is a good indicator of a laying worker. A queen bee's abdomen is noticeably longer than a worker, allowing a queen to lay an egg at the bottom of the cell.
Queen (marked) surrounded by Africanized workers . A queen bee is typically an adult, mated female that lives in a colony or hive of honey bees.With fully developed reproductive organs, the queen is usually the mother of most, if not all, of the bees in the beehive. [1]
Cloake board insertion: The Cloake board is placed between two hive bodies when the queen is known to be in the lower hive body. Because a Cloake board either contains or is used with a queen excluder, the laying queen will be restricted to the lower hive body from this point forward.
Worker policing is an example of forced altruism, where the benefits of worker reproduction are minimized and that of rearing the queen's offspring maximized. In very rare instances, workers subvert the policing mechanisms of the hive, laying eggs faster than other workers remove them; this is known as anarchic syndrome.
Workers of A. florea, like those of the species A. mellifera, also engage in worker policing, a process where nonqueen eggs are removed from the hive. Queenless A. florea colonies have been observed to merge with nearby queen-right A. florea colonies, suggesting workers are attracted to queen bee pheromones. [33]
The queen is normally the only egg producer. However, when a colony becomes queenless, some workers which have intact, undeveloped ovaries may develop them and thus become capable of laying more eggs. [4] So in certain colonies, a singly mated worker called a gamergate reproduces as the functional queen in that colony. [5]
Workers do not oviposit when queens are present, for a variety of reasons: colonies tend to be small enough that queens can effectively dominate workers; queens practice selective oophagy; the flow of nutrients favors queen over workers; and queens rapidly lay eggs in new or vacated cells.