{"id":256142,"date":"2026-06-05T05:43:45","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T05:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/256142\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T05:43:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T05:43:45","slug":"it-turns-out-bees-crown-queens-via-a-buckingham-palace-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/256142\/","title":{"rendered":"It Turns Out Bees Crown Queens Via A ‘Buckingham Palace’ Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bees have been around for at least 120 million<\/a> years, when, Scientific American<\/a> said, our own ancestors were \u201crat-like\u201d creatures.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d think that\u2019d give us plenty of time to learn about them. But so much information about their lives\u00a0\u2013 like how exactly they fly, and why they can live underwater<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 has only been revealed relatively recently.<\/p>\n

A new study,\u00a0published in Nature, looked into how they choose their queens (the sole breeding females in the hive), too.<\/p>\n

And it may not be as simple as giving them the famous specialised \u201croyal jelly\u201d secretions, which many non-queen bee larvae <\/a>are also fed briefly, though this certainly seems to be a part of the picture.<\/p>\n

The hive may have a \u201cBuckingham Palace\u201d process\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to BBC Wildlife Magazine<\/a>, a bee\u2019s destiny as either a worker or a queen is determined by how it\u2019s raised.<\/p>\n

\u201cA worker bee is reared in one of the many thousands of identical, hexagonal, wax-walled compartments of the honeycomb,\u201d they write.\u00a0\u201cA queen, on the other hand, develops in a spacious brood chamber called a queen cell, which bulges out from the honeycomb.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers of this new study said<\/a> that the physical structure of the hive matters in the process of making a queen, adding that these bees might have \u201croyal cribs\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe old idea was relatively simple: take an egg, move it into a queen cell, feed it royal jelly, and you get a queen,\u201d said Boris Baer, entomologist and director of the Centre for Integrative Bee Research (CIBER<\/a>) at the University of California, Riverside, whose laboratory contributed to the work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found is that there\u2019s an entire machinery behind this process. It\u2019s much more sophisticated than we imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using a variety of tracking, testing, and imaging techniques, researchers found that the \u201cpeanut-shaped\u201d queen cell is less dense and more pliable, capable of maintaining more heat and moisture. Its waxy walls have different chemical signals and fatty acids.<\/p>\n

To test whether the cell itself made a difference, researchers put developing queen bees into these cells and worker cells and fed them the same diet of royal jelly. Queen bees were less likely to die and grew larger in the peanut-shaped cells than those in regular worker bee ones.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can think of it as something like Buckingham Palace,\u201d said Baer.<\/p>\n

Is that all?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nope\u00a0\u2013 of course, a palace needs staff.<\/p>\n

This study suggested that worker bees which helped to raise the queen were younger and maintained a higher average body temperature on average than those raising other bees.<\/p>\n

This seemed to help the queen bees grow faster and larger.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a dedicated group of bees focused entirely on raising the queen, and if they don\u2019t get it right, the colony cannot reproduce,\u201d said Baer.<\/p>\n

The study also found that bees seemed to selectively gather material for the coming queen from across the hive, enriching and transforming it carefully before use.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis work highlights how much sophistication exists inside insect societies,\u201d Baer said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHoneybee colonies are not simply collections of individuals. They function as integrated biological systems capable of engineering their own environments.\u201d<\/p>\n

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