Social and nutritional factors controlling the growth of honey bee (Apis mellifera) queens.

ABSTRACT: The honey bee queen is essential for colony function, laying hundreds of eggs daily and determining the colony's genetic composition. Beekeepers cultivate and trade queens to enhance colony health and productivity. Despite its significance, artificial queen rearing in foster queenless colonies has remained largely unchanged for over a century, offering limited control over the environmental conditions influencing larval development. In this study, we developed a laboratory-based method for queen bee rearing, establishing a protocol for rearing queens in cages by nurse bees in the lab under controlled environmental conditions. We first investigated the minimal number of worker bees required to rear a single queen and found that groups of 200 workers raise queens with comparable success and

SUBMITTER: Kama O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11856481 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature