Queen Bees - Stages of Development

It's the time of year when bees turn their attention to reproduction, and that means making new colonies.  This is why bees swarm - basically, the colony splits into two, with half staying at home, and the other half flying off with the queen to make a new home - this is the swarm.

Now, every colony needs a queen, so what do the "stay at home" bees do, if their queen has just departed with the swarm?  Simple - they make one!  Actually, they're quite pro-active - so they will start making new queens before the swarm - 8 or more days before, in fact.  The colony will make one one more queen cells, and the queen will lay an egg in each one.  The egg then hatches, and the workers feed the growing larva on royal jelly for 7 days.  On the 8th day, they close the end of the queen cell with wax.  And somehow, they know that once there is a closed, complete queen cell, it's show-time - and at any moment from the 8th day, as long as it's warm and sunny, they will swarm.

Then, 16 days after the egg was laid, the new, fully-formed queen will nibble her way out of the cell, and take her new position in the hive.

It's interesting to look at the development of the queen cell and the larva within.  Here are two queen cells - the one on the left was started a couple of days earlier than the one on the right.  Notice that, unlike worker bee cells, they are not horizontal with the opening at the side, but vertical, with the opening at the bottom:

Here's what they look like from below - notice how the larvae look like curled-up maggots:

Here's a cell that I cut out of Miriam's hive on Saturday.  From the length of it, I would estimate it to be 6-7 days old.  Lucky I got to it on Saturday, or by Tuesday they would have swarmed!  The opening (which was at the bottom of the cell) is to the right of the picture:

Looking at the same cell, but from the top (which broke open when I removed the cell) you can see the larva:

This next cell is a different one, which I cut out of hive #2 on Saturday.  It is closed at the bottom, and probably 12-13 days old.  We are actually looking at this cell from the top (again, the top broke open as I removed the cell).  The white bit you can see is the developing queen's abdomen - she forms in the cell with her abdomen at the top, and her head at the bottom:

In this last picture, I have opened up the cell so that you can see the whole queen.  You can see that she has almost finished metamorphosis - her legs are fully formed, and segmentation of her body into head, thorax and abdomen is almost complete.  However, her body is still soft - her exoskeleton has not yet formed, and her eyes have not finished developing.  If I'd left her in the hive, she would have completed development in around 3-4 days: