{"id":254057,"date":"2026-06-03T18:34:46","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T18:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/254057\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T18:34:46","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T18:34:46","slug":"queen-bees-emerge-from-special-wax-chambers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/254057\/","title":{"rendered":"Queen bees emerge from special wax chambers"},"content":{"rendered":"

A honeybee larva\u2019s ascent to royalty is shaped by more than gobbling up royal jelly; it is also dictated by her cradle. Scientists have discovered that the queen cells are made of chemically engineered, \u201cbespoke\u201d wax<\/a> that is critical for the survival and development of future queens (Nature 2026, DOI: 10.1038\/s41586-026-10534-3).<\/p>\n

For decades, the scientific consensus held that the larvae fed an exclusive diet of royal jelly<\/a> grew into fertile, long-lived queens, while their sisters who got standard fare grew into sterile workers<\/a>. Although nutrition is undeniably important, researchers suspected something else was also at play.<\/p>\n

One place to look was the cells in which queen bees are reared. These are large, vertical wax cells, totally different from the classic hexagonal honeycomb of workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cHoneybees invest enormous effort in building highly specialized queen cells,\u201d Boris Baer<\/a>, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, says in an email. \u201cFrom an evolutionary perspective, it seemed unlikely that such elaborate structures existed simply as containers for food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baer and his collaborators investigated the physical and chemical properties of the queen cells and worker cells of western honeybees (Apis mellifera). They used scanning electron microscopy to examine the wax\u2019s physical structure and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to run a full chemical audit.<\/p>\n

The researchers found that, compared with worker cell wax, queen cell wax is richer in unsaturated fatty acids, specifically oleic acid, linoleic acid, and \u03b1-linolenic acid, and poorer in n-alkanes, such as pentacosane, and wax esters. It also has a lower density, hardness, and mechanical strength (both tensile and compressive) than its worker counterparts and exhibits a significantly higher peak melting temperature.<\/p>\n

Using a specialized tracking system with thermal imaging and high-definition lenses, the researchers monitored the bees\u2019 construction activities and identified a dedicated crew of queen-cell builder bees who are significantly younger than their worker-cell-building counterparts. These builders physically overheat their bodies to nearly 40 \u00b0C to process the queen\u2019s wax and also completely alter the chemical signature of the royal nursery.<\/p>\n

To prove the cells do play a role in raising new queens, Baer\u2019s team grafted newly hatched queen larvae into cells capped with standard worker wax. Of the grafted queen larvae, 62.5% died. The grafting experiment was repeated with eastern honeybees (Apis cerana), and the results were quite similar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe suspect that developing larvae are responding to a combination of chemical cues and physical properties of the wax, much like developing embryos in other animals respond to signals from their environment,\u201d Baer says.<\/p>\n

Gene E. Robinson<\/a>, a honeybee biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who wasn\u2019t involved in the research, says the work is \u201ccompelling\u201d and an \u201coutstanding example\u201d of interdisciplinary research. \u201cThe evidence presented in this paper strongly supports the existence of a highly specialized group of worker bees dedicated to queen rearing,\u201d Robinson says in an email to C&EN. The new findings align with his earlier research that found that different worker genotypes show distinct preferences for either queen or worker rearing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s quite interesting,\u201d says James Nieh<\/a>, an ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, who also wasn\u2019t involved in the research. He wonders if a similar mechanism works in other bees, like those in the genus Melipona where \u201cthe workers themselves decide whether or not to become a queen.\u201d He speculates that the answer may also lie in the chemical properties of the cells whose occupants become queens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A honeybee larva\u2019s ascent to royalty is shaped by more than gobbling up royal jelly; it is also…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[13169,99002,99003,99004,9,24,63,67578,122,124,123,99005],"class_list":["post-254057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-bees","tag-biobased-materials","tag-biomaterials","tag-chemical-communication","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queen-bee","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-wax"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}