THE SACRAMENTO BEE - Every colony of bees is overseen by a queen who produces all the colony's eggs, but what makes a queen bee a queen?
For decades, biologists believed that queen bee development was a result of the consumpion of royal jelly, but a new study published on June 3 in Nature scientific journal found that where a queen develops and who surrounds her may play just as important of a role. We spoke with Boris Baer, UC Riverside entomology professor and co-author of the study, to discover more about how queen bees are made.