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Queens

The queen bee is a fertile female, who, unlike workers (which are also female), has a fully developed reproductive system. She is larger than her workers, and has a characteristic rounder, longer abdomen. A female egg can become either a queen or a worker bee. Workers and queen larvae are both fed royal jelly, which is high in protein and low in flavonoids, during the first three days. After that, larval prospective workers are switched to a diet of mixed pollen and nectar (often called "bee bread"), while prospective queens continue to receive royal jelly. In the absence of flavonoids and the presence of a high-protein diet, female bees grow into queens by developing the vigorous reproductive system necessary to maintain a colony of tens of thousands of daughter workers.

Periodically, the colony determines that a new queen is needed. There are three general causes:

Emergency supersedure can generally be recognized because new queen cells are built out from comb cells, instead of hanging from the bottom of a frame. Regardless of the trigger, workers develop existing larvae into queens by continuing to feed them royal jelly, rather than switching them to bee bread, and by extending the selected larvae's cells to house the developing larger-bodied queens.

Queens are not raised in the typical horizontal brood cells of the honeycomb. A queen cell is larger and oriented vertically. If workers sense that an old queen is weakening, they produce emergency cells (known as supersedure cells) from cells with eggs or young larvae and which protrude from the comb. When the queen finishes her larval feeding and pupates, she moves into a head-downward position and later chews her way out of the cell. At pupation, workers cap (seal) the cell. The queen asserts control over the worker bees by releasing a complex suite of pheromones, known as queen scent.

After several days of orientation in and around the hive, the young queen flies to a drone congregation area – a site near a clearing and generally about 30 feet (9.1 m) above the ground – where drones from different hives congregate. They detect the presence of a queen in their congregation area by her smell, find her by sight and mate with her in midair; drones can be induced to mate with "dummy" queens with the queen pheromone. A queen will mate multiple times, and may leave to mate several days in a row (weather permitting) until her spermatheca is full.

The queen lays all the eggs in a healthy colony. The number and pace of egg-laying is controlled by weather, resource availability and specific racial characteristics. Queens generally begin to slow egg-laying in the early fall, and may stop during the winter. Egg-laying generally resumes in late winter when the days lengthen, peaking in the spring. At the height of the season, the queen may lay over 2,500 eggs per day (more than her body mass).

She fertilizes each egg (with stored sperm from the spermatheca) as it is laid in a worker-sized cell. Eggs laid in drone-sized (larger) cells are left unfertilized; these unfertilized eggs, with half as many genes as queen or worker eggs, develop into drones.