EARTH.COM - For years, one idea dominated the story of how a honeybee queen is made. Give an ordinary larva enough royal jelly, and it becomes royalty.
It seemed straightforward – a special diet created a special bee.
New research now shows that the process is far more complex. A future queen does not grow up in just any part of the hive.
She is raised inside a carefully prepared environment built by worker bees that appear to have one job: making sure the colony’s next ruler develops properly.
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Boris Baer is director of the Center for Integrative Bee Research (CIBER) at the University of California, Riverside, whose laboratory contributed to the work.