Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 93

A queen is reared in large, vertical cell as opposed to the smaller horizontal cell of a worker. All female larvae are fed essentially the same diet for the first 24 hours, up to which point any could potentially become a queen. After that, developmental paths switch, with larvae chosen by the nurses to be a queen being fed to excess, with much of the jelly not being consumed until after her cell is “sealed.”

Although the common conception is that queen larvae are fed a special “royal jelly,” whereas worker larvae are fed “worker jelly” and pollen, this explanation is controversial, especially considering how logistically difficult it would be for the nurse bees which are constantly moving.¹ The most parsimonious (but debatable) explanation is that the nurses adjust the proportions of the three components of jelly dependent upon the age and caste of the larva being fed. Those components are (i) a protein‐rich secretion from the hypopharyngeal glands, (ii) a lipid‐rich secretion from the mandibular glands, and (iii) the amount of nectar added. Queen larvae receive not only a far greater amount of jelly, but higher proportions of lipids and sugars (Winston 1987; Wang et al. 2016). Queen larvae thus grow more rapidly than do worker larvae, to a greater size, and emerge at an earlier age.

Figure 5.1 The queen functions not only as the ovary of the honey bee superorganism, but also as the pheromonal “heart” of the hive, critical for colony cohesiveness. In a rapidly‐growing colony, roughly a thousand of her daughters die each day from natural aging and mortality. Thus, in order to maintain colony growth, the queen must not only lay an adequate number of eggs to replace those lost workers, but also enough for population increase, as many as 1500 a day.

Figure 5.2 Whenever a “good” queen pauses on the comb, an ad hoc group of adjacent nurse bees will turn to face her, offering her food, and antennating her to pick up her pheromones (Collison 2017). This ring of attendants is called a “retinue.” Since the advent of varroa, some are suggesting that queens these days don't seem to attract retinues the way they used to. It is possible that this may correlate with what appear to be reports of greater rates of queen failure.

Figure 5.3 A well‐fed queen is an egg‐laying machine, capable of producing an egg per minute, 24 hours a day (and up to double that rate in bursts). If she cannot locate an empty cell, she will just drop the egg (as this queen is doing), which will be consumed and recycled by a nurse bee.