The Social and Nutritional Factors Controlling the Growth of Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Queens

Abstract

The honey bee queen is essential for colony function, laying thousands 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 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 weight to those reared in colonies. As a proof of concept, we examined the impact of larval age on rearing success in our new system. We found that the age of the larvae affects the success rate of queen development and that younger larvae developed into heavier queens than older larvae, as published in the past using the traditional queen-rearing method. Additionally, we assessed the influence of pollen nutrition on queen-rearing success, finding that a high pollen concentration is crucial for queen development. These findings and the new method provide a foundation for studying queen bee development in a controlled environment and offer potential applications for improving queen-rearing practices.