Honey production is important because it has various health benefits. It can only be achieved when bees get nectar from the flowers. Bees store the honey inside the beehive, which is later extracted by a beekeeper.
Getting honey from bees requires a professional beekeeper. Before you get the honey from the hive, you must know about the queen bee, which is the heart of the hive.
The queen bee is responsible for keeping the colony alive and growing. It doesn’t help with honey production; its role in maintaining the whole hive is essential. Without the queen bee, the hive would collapse, and there would be no more honey production.
Fertility and Life Span
Before buying queen bees for sale, you must know about their lifespan and fertility. A queen bee only does mating once in her whole life. When she flies in the air, she chooses 10 to 20 male bees for mating. Later, she stores the male sperm in her body for 2 to 5 years. This storage helps her produce more bees throughout the years.
Because queen bees only mate one time and store eggs for many years, they can only live upto few years. The average lifespan of queen bees is 2 to 5 years, but worker bees only last up to 6 weeks, and drones only a few more months.
Strong Honey Collection
A queen honey bee is the one who manages the whole hive and runs a system to produce honey. They are very organized and have assigned different labor roles to their colony. She decides the role on the basis of the age of the worker. In the beginning, she assigns the role of cleaners to the bees.
Then she assigns them the nurse role to feed the growing larvae and the queen bee. Later, she makes them builders and guards, who produce wax to build the storage comb and protect the hive entrance.
In the end, she assigns them the task of collecting nectar, pollen, and water.
Hive Recovery
The hive faces various crises and damage because of predators or climate change. Queen bees recover because they run a very organized system that helps the hive recover even if the population is lost or there is huge damage.
The workers are highly trained, so if the queen dies, they choose another young female bee as their queen. If the bees are attacked by any pest that could make them sick, they use bee glue, which is sticky resin. This sterilizes the hive wall, as it has antibacterial properties.
Egg Production
Queen bees can produce upto 2,000 per day, and she is the only fertile female in the whole hive. The weight of these eggs is more than the bees’ weight itself. She produces two types of eggs: fertilized eggs and unfertilized eggs.
She produces fertilized and unfertilized eggs according to her own will. A female egg is the fertilized one, while the male, which becomes a drone later, is the unfertilized egg.