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Svenska The Queen bee is the only female able to procreate and for this reason she is the only mother in the colony.
The Queen bee is the only female able to procreate and for this reason she is the only mother in the colony. Its aims are to mate with the drones at the time of the bridal flight, to lay the fertilized eggs, to produce the real pheromone, useful for the recognition of the bees in the family and to swarm, or to leave the honeycomb to give life to new colonies.
Identifying the Queen bee in the hive is sometimes complex for the same beekeepers. Although, as we will see shortly, is the largest in the hive, differentiate it from the other (we talk about numbers sometimes ranging from 60,000 to 80,000 "individuals") is certainly not immediate. What are the differences with the worker bee? In a nutshell, the Queen bee has the most elongated trunk: the length is around two centimeters.
His abdomen, as well as being more developed and pointed than the worker bee, is also more shining. Unlike the workers, the Queen bee has no apparatus to collect the pollen, the ceripar glands and the pharyngeal glands. Its task consists in the deposition of eggs and it manages to reach even up to 2,000 per day.
If you have a magnifying glass and you want to recognize the queen bee more quickly, find the one with no hairs on the sting. The difference is that the worker bees are provided and once they sting, the hairs favor the exit of the sting from the abdomen, in fact killing them. Since the Queen does not possess hairs, it could not sting with repetition: specifically, its sting differs from that of the worker bees, also because it is characterized by hands equipped with 3 or 4 side hooks. As a result, the Queen bee can more easily extract the sting of the affected victim (in most cases it is another queen bee), showing her unchallenged supremacy within the colony.
Another aspect that differentiates the Queen bee from the worker bee is that the former has the wings spread out to move faster inside the hive. To make recognition more immediate, beekeepers use a colored code.
The marking is safe and is done by means of a colored marker or disc. The colors indicate when the Queen was introduced in the colony: The Blue indicates the year ending with 0 or with 5, the green with 4 or with 9, the Rocco with 3 or with 8 the yellow with 2 or with 7 and finally the white or the grey more rarely with the 1 or With the 6.