![]() ![]() In cultures around the world, royal jelly has been used to promote a healthy and long life. ![]() How has Royal Jelly been used throughout history? Working in this way, a beekeeper can harvest ~500g (~17 ounces) of royal jelly per hive in a season. If she is too early or too late, there won’t be enough royal jelly to harvest. At the perfect moment (usually between the second and fourth day of larval development), the beekeeper will remove the royal jelly from the queen cups with a small suction tool. The nurse bees will fill the cups with royal jelly. Instinctively, the workers will start raising queens for their colony, using the eggs and queen cups provided. Next, she inserts fake queen cups into this colony (several rows of plastic or wax cups that are the right size for bees to build queen cells on), each cup containing a honey bee egg, hand grafted into each cup. She ensures that this small colony has many young bees that will work as nurse bees in the hive. First, a beekeeper creates a small colony of bees with no queen. It is no wonder that royal jelly is an expensive product, as its production is a painstaking process that requires close attention and precise timing. It’s amazing to think that such a different set of abilities and behaviors can arise from the simple matter of food! It makes you want to take your vitamins, doesn’t it? Or perhaps, just a nice healthy dinner, followed by a good spoonful of royal jelly infused raw honey. They also collect and distribute her queenly pheromones throughout the hive, letting all the hive’s residents know that their queen is alive and well. This is more than her own body weight in eggs! The queen is always surrounded by a circle of devoted workers who feed her constantly and dispose of her waste. ![]() In the height of the Spring, the queen can lay up to 2,000+ eggs a day. She will find a ‘drone congregation area’ – a place where male (drone) bees from other hives hang out and wait for a queen, and over several days will mate with 12-20 drones in mid-air, gathering as much genetic material as she will need for her entire life (up to six million sperm!).īack at the hive, the queen’s main role is ‘reproducer in chief.’ She will control the size of the hive, laying more eggs in preparation for Spring and Summer, and slowing laying in preparation for the cooler months when there’s less work to do and less food around. If two or more queens hatch at the same time, they will fight to the death!Ībout three to five days after emerging, on a sunny day with low wind, the new queen will take her ‘nuptial flight’. ![]() The first queen to emerge will sting the other developing queens through their cells, killing them before they can hatch. When a hive needs a new queen, it will select up to 10 larvae less than three days old, and begin feeding them royal jelly. Queen bees are up to 1.5 times the size of worker bees, and live generations, are sexually mature (unlike worker bees who cannot mate), and have a totally different set of behaviors from the other bees in the hive. After the larval stage is complete and the queen bee emerges, she is fed royal jelly throughout her life. While all larvae are fed royal jelly for the first three days, of life, larvae chosen by the worker bees to become queens are bathed in royal jelly in special, elongated ‘queen cells’ throughout their development. Royal jelly is a protein-rich excretion from the glands of worker bees – I think of it as a honey bee’s version of mother’s milk. What is this magic food? It’s not broccoli! It’s the aptly named substance, royal jelly. This different meal plan causes their physiology and behavior to develop completely differently from worker bees, despite the same genetic foundation. But they’re fed a different diet from worker bees their whole lives, from the time they are tiny larvae, until the day they die. Amazingly, queen bees are genetically exactly identical to worker bees. There is no creature for which this is more true than the honey bee. ![]()
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