Flight of the Matriarch: Do Queen Bees Leave the Hive?

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A healthy hive typically has between 60,000 and 80,000 honeybees. While a hive has a few hundred drones and thousands of worker bees, the hive will contain a single queen bee. Queen bees are undoubtedly the most important bee in the colony since the survival of the colony is dependent on the production of brood. The longest-living member of the hive, queen bees typically live two to three years, but can live up to five years. The queen is so important, she has attendants that provide for her every need from grooming to feeding. This allows her to pour her time and energy into laying thousands of eggs every single day. With such an important job, do queen bees leave the hive?

​Making a Queen

Queen bees simply aren’t born by chance, they are made! While the queen typically gets credit for ruling the hive, it’s the worker bees that call the shots! Driven by the queen’s pheromones, the entire hive works for the betterment of the colony. If the queen isn’t meeting her quotas (not laying sufficient eggs) or the honey bee colony can’t sense the queen pheromone, they create a new queen.

While the queen bee looks completely different from a typical worker bee, genetically she is no different. Queen bees are fed a special diet of royal jelly their entire life. Whether it is the royal jelly or the exclusion of bee bread in her diet, this unique diet is what creates the physiological changes between a queen bee and a common worker bee. 

The queen bee’s sole purpose within the honeybee colony is to lay eggs. Since her duties confine her to the hive, she leaves the safety of the hive for only a few reasons.

An Essential Flight: Mating

When a new queen bee hatches within a beehive she is infertile, a virgin queen. While every hive contains male drones capable of reproduction, queen bees leave the hive to mate. To ensure genetic diversity, queen bees seek drone congregation areas where they will mate with multiple drones. While the drone bees don’t fight for the right to mate, as they don’t even have stingers, they do fly closely to the queens, trying to attract her attention. Once the bees have mated, the drone’s endophallus is ripped from his body and he will die soon after. Since a queen will take a mating flight only once in her entire life, she mates with 10 to 20 drones to ensure she has enough semen to last the rest of her life. She stores the semen inside her body in her spermatheca. 

If the young queen fails to take her maiden flight, while she can lay unfertilized eggs that produce drones, she can not lay fertilized eggs that produce female bees. Likely she will be replaced by the colony. You may find supercedure cells in your hive where the worker bees are creating a new queen to overthrow the virgin queen. Once a new queen hatches and completes her mating flight, she will return and kill the old queen. Unlike female worker bees that can only use their stinger one time, queen bees can sting multiple times making them a formidable opponent. 

A Dangerous Journey

The mating flight is a dangerous journey for a queen honey bee. While there are various reasons why a virgin queen may not return, dragonflies and birds are common predators that can eat bees. Humans also pose serious threats to honeybees with pesticide use and reduced honeybee habitats. 

Preparing to Swarm

Another time that a queen bee leaves the hive is during swarming. Bees reproduce in two ways, one is through normal reproduction where young bees are born and raised within the colony. The other method of reproduction is through swarming, where bees split to create separate colonies.   When the colony becomes too large, the worker bees will prepare to swarm. The first step in swarming is the bees will create swarm cells. These elongated cells, similar to queen cups are usually located at the bottom of the frames. These specialized cells ensure there is a suitable cell for the remaining bees to create a new queen. Honey bee workers will also slim the queen down so that she can fly. 

Swarm Flight

When the hive is ready, the queen bee and half of the worker bees will swarm. If you have never seen a bee swarm, it’s quite impressive! A swarm of honey bees looks like a tornado of bees. While swarming the bees are not aggressive since they have no home to protect, though they can still sting if provoked.  Since the queen can not fly long distances, they will travel for short periods and rest on a nearby tree branch. The swarm of bees beards together to protect the queen. While the bees rest, scout bees find a new home to relocate the hive. To ensure the bees have food upon arrival, the bees fill their honey stomachs full of raw honey. Their honey stores will give them food until they can begin building food stores within their new hive.

The Bees Left Behind

Shortly after the queen leaves the hive, the rest of the colony in the old hive will sense her lack of pheromones.  This will prompt them to finish the work started in the swarm cells. Since the only difference between a worker bee and a queen bee is her diet, they begin to feed certain young larvae an exclusive diet of royal jelly.  While most queen bees are fed an exclusive diet of royal jelly their entire life, in a pinch larvae older than 3 days old may be chosen to become the new queen if there are no suitable larvae or eggs available in the hive. 

Absconding Flight

The only other reason a queen bee might leave the hive is if the existing colony needs to abscond. The difference between absconding and bee swarms is that the entire colony will leave as a group when the bees abscond, rather than leave a portion of the bees behind. Bees abscond if their hive is destroyed, or there is a threat to their current location. Just like swarming they take as many resources with them as they can. 

Healthy Queen Bee

Once settled in a new location, the worker bees fulfill various roles to rebuild the hive.  The honey bee queen will begin laying eggs as soon as possible. Since female worker bees typically live only 6 weeks, young brood are constantly needed to ensure there are enough bees for the hive to survive. A weak hive is more susceptible to robbing, starving, or pests. Therefore, the colony works hard to take care of the queen to ensure the success of the entire colony.