Queen honey bees don’t need to go out searching for food; she receives royal jelly as an offering from her attendants. Royal jelly is a milky substance produced from hypopharyngeal glands of young worker bees, secreted into their hypopharyngeal cavities by hypopharyngeal glands of worker bees during pupation.
Larvae selected for breeding are fed royal jelly exclusively throughout their development; this process is known as epigenetics.
Contents
Nectar
Nectar is an abundant source of sugar and protein found within beehives. Queen bees and worker bees alike feed off nectar for its energy-packed carbohydrates as it plays a vital role in egg laying processes.
Bees use their long, tubular tongues to siphon nectar from flowers and store it in their hive’s “crop,” a honey storage stomach. Once inside their home hive, bees transform nectar into honey via regurgitation and evaporation processes before mixing it with pollen to create bee bread that they feed to immature bees.
The queen bee, however, stands out as an exception: rather than feasting on honey or pollen for sustenance, she instead enjoys royal jelly – an abundance of proteins, vitamins and minerals found within its secretions – making up its diet. Royal jelly gives queen bees their physical maturity and extended lives; furthermore it allows them to lay eggs without ever leaving their cup thanks to an active chemical known as royalactin present within royal jelly.
Honey
As the only bee in a colony that can lay eggs, the queen plays an indispensable role. While many perceive her to be the central decision-maker of her colony, the truth may be more nuanced than expected.
At hatching, bee larvae are fed a special fluid called royal jelly. All bees receive this nourishment for three days after hatching; those intended to become queens continue receiving royal jelly throughout their development. It contains sugars, lipids, proteins and vitamins; this diet allows future queens to develop quickly while also developing distinct physical traits including functioning ovaries.
Queen bees secrete an array of chemicals from their mandibular lobe gland, known as queen bee pheromones. Workers use them to communicate about the status of their colony; when detected at high concentration within their hive, it signifies that the queen bee is alive and well.
Pollen
Bees subsist primarily on nectar and pollen for sustenance, providing them with both protein-rich food sources as well as antioxidant properties. When foraging for food, foraging bees store it in special baskets on their hind legs called pollen baskets – holding as many as 160,000 grains which they transport back to the hive in quick flights up to 12 times daily.
Bees store honey and pollen to sustain them through winter, while their workers convert nectar into honey by repeatedly regurgitating, evaporating and fermenting it. Workers consume both nectar and pollen throughout their lives while developing queens are exclusively fed royal jelly containing proteins, vitamins minerals and antibacterial compounds for maximum sustenance during development.
After three days of feeding on royal jelly, developing queen bees emerge as adults ready to mate. In order to prevent their death at the hands of other bees, developing queen larvae fight off other queen cells by stinging them until death occurs.
Royal Jelly
All fertilized honey bee eggs contain the potential to develop into either queens or workers when they hatch as larvae, with queens receiving more royal jelly than workers during their first three days in order to grow faster and larger than workers while developing reproductive organs that distinguishes them from workers.
Royal jelly is widely thought to trigger an epigenetic process (in which external environmental conditions impact gene expression) which converts female larvae to queen bees. But new research is debunking this notion that royal jelly acts as an on/off switch for young bees’ fates.
Scientists discovered that it’s the bee’s diet – specifically what they don’t consume – that determines its fate as either queen or worker bee. Not just in terms of how much royal jelly they consume but also whether pollen and nectar is available.