Let’s take a quick look at how many queens a hive can have and how important they are to the colony. There can be (usually) only one queen bee in a hive, so when new queens hatch, they must kill off rivals. This sometimes results in two queens in the same hive as worker bees decide if they need a new queen.
A hive has one queen bee. It has numerous female bees, but only one is a queen. It also has numerous male bees. Each hive contains only one queen, and the queen appears indiscernible from the others. Queen bees are created from female bees when the royal jelly is administered to a female during its larval stage.
In many cases, when the colony needs a new queen, the worker bees have a big influence on who becomes the queen. Sometimes, when a new queen emerges, the old queen is still present, again resulting in more than one queen in the colony. Because they grow multiple queens when replacing existing queens, sometimes two queens appear in the hive at the same time.
Locating Bee Queens Is a Struggle
Sometimes it is difficult to find a queen, so the beekeeper simply combines two colonies without removing one of the queens first. When combinations occur, the beekeeper will often find the queen from the weakest hive and kill her before joining the two bee colonies. Swarm, replacement and fight are not the only situations where at least two queens live in the hive.
The natural order or hierarchy of the bees is such that each hive has one queen. Each hive contains a colony of worker bees, drones, and the queen herself. In addition to the workers and the queen, the colony usually includes several hundred drones (male bees). Each hive contains one queen, tens of thousands of female workers, and several hundred to several thousand male drones during the spring and summer months.
A honey bee colony needs a healthy queen to continue laying eggs so that there are enough workers to maintain and feed the hive. When the worker bees begin to notice that their current queen is not keeping up or producing enough eggs to grow the colony, they make the difficult decision to replace it.
If a honey bee colony waits only a few days, it will be too late for a new queen to breed, as it will no longer have a fertile queen to lay eggs, nor larvae young enough to develop into queen bees (once they reach a certain age, it gets too late to feed the larvae with the right food they need to develop into queens, so they become worker bees instead). As long as there are sufficient resources in the colony (newly fertilized eggs or larvae), honey bees can start creating a new queen.
The Contributions of the Queen to the Hive
A single queen bee in each hive lays enough eggs to meet the needs of the hive and explains the relatively short lifespan of worker bees. When a healthy queen dies, is too old or sick to lay enough eggs or leaves the colony, the colony must breed a new queen to replace it. The queen bee usually reports the death of the colony because the worker bees do not have fertilized larvae (females) to feed the worker bees or replace the queen bee.
When an old queen is accidentally killed, lost or removed, the bees select the youngest worker larvae to produce emergency queens. If the hive has become very large, the old queen may bring the swarm of bees to another place to create a new hive. One and the same uterus can be accompanied by up to twenty thousand bees – this is called a swarm.
Usually only one adult queen mates in a hive, in which case the bees usually follow and fiercely defend only one adult. The main reason why the natural order of bees is “single queen colony” is because the queens are always fighting for the right to mate in order to lay eggs.
One of the first things beekeepers learn, often before taking bees, is that there are many bees in the colony, but only one queen. In some cases, beekeepers may use a multi-queen hive, where the queens essentially have a colony within the same bee hive structure, but do not have access to each other.
Queens Require Drones and Workers for Colony Construction
Although queens are extremely powerful in their communities, they cannot create new colonies without the help of drones and workers who provide fertilization, food, and wax to build the hive. As the worker bees mature, the worker bees take on more tasks in the hive, including feeding one female queen and developing brood, extracting new combs, and managing food supplies.
Unlike other females in the colony, the queen bee does not perform the duties of worker bees such as tending the hive, caring for the brood, foraging for food, or converting nectar into honey.
About a week after leaving the queen cell, the queen leaves the hive to mate with several flying drones. Once the battle is over, the queen will make a nuptial flight… the only flight from the hive to mate with the male drones. Within a few days of returning to the hive after mating, the queen begins to lay eggs to create the next generation of colonies.
One problem is that the queen must fly a long distance to build a new home (usually over 800 feet from the original nesting site). Beekeepers know that if they tried to create a scenario in which two queens roam the same brood at the same time, introducing another queen into a queen-eligible colony, then the new queen would almost certainly be gagged and destroyed by local bees.
