Question: what happens when a queen bee dies???

Catherine Offord answered on 19 Jun 2014:

It’s pretty bad news for the colony if it’s very unexpected and the colony is small – only the queen can reproduce, and so if the queen dies, that means no more eggs. But in general, the queens are replaced.

Worker bees ‘create’ queens in the nest by feeding some of the larvae (baby bees) a special, high protein diet called ‘royal jelly’. Unlike the other larvae, which eat honey and turn into normal worker bees, larvae eating royal jelly turn into queen bees. That means that when a queen gets too old to produce more eggs, one of these new queens can naturally replace her.

If a queen bee dies unexpectedly, workers may switch some larvae to an ’emergency royal jelly diet’ to try to turn them into queens. It’s a bit like losing a key striker in the World Cup to an injury and then having to train up a replacement very fast 🙂

If the colony is very small and the bees can’t raise another queen in time, then it’s possible that the colony will gradually die. On the other hand, if too many queens are raised at the same time, they may have to have a FIGHT TO THE DEATH to decide which one of them will be queen. Dramatic stuff, eh?