The queen is the largest of the honeybees, she is almost 2cm tall.
She also lives much longer than the other bees: between 2 and 5 years.
She is the mother of the entire bee community in the hive.
A queen is born from a simple egg. But this egg is fed royal jelly instead of honey. This makes her so big and strong. Upon birth she will fight with the current queen, sometimes for life or death. As a matter of fact, there can be only one queen in the hive.
Normally it doesn’t come to this and the current queen leaves the hive with part of the bee population. This is called swarming.The beekeeper, who does not like losing his bees, will try to catch this swarm and put it in a new hive.
Bees of one and the same community recognise each other by the smell spread by the queen. They pass this smell on to each other.
The queen is always surrounded by 12 worker bees who lick and groom her and feed her with royal jelly. When laying eggs, the queen will first check whether the cell is clean and large enough. She then puts her abdomen in the cell and lays the egg.
In summer she does this up to 1600 times a day.