
Loyalty Nearly Killed My Beehive - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/loyalty-nearly-killed-my-beehive-rp
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yawz
Beekeeper, here. Just want to correct this: "the microbial mix that honeybees
feed to their larva when they want to raise a new queen. " All larvae eat
royal jelly for the first three days. All but the queens stop at that.

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JenBarb
I come from a family of beekeepers and I had no idea that all larvae eat royal
jelly early on. That's pretty neat!

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jly
There has been interesting research over the last couple years on this topic.
It is in fact not royal jelly that pushes female bees down the queen
development path, but rather the addition of honey and pollen that stops them
from becoming queens. Feeding beebread to female larvae is what alters their
gene expression to less developed ovaries, because of a specific plant
chemical, where they would all normally develop into queens.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500795

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robbles
Does that mean you can mass-produce queens by separating them from the hive
and continuing to feed them the jelly?

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kurthr
Yes, people do Queen-farm by doing exactly that. Then they sell them for Re-
Queening that many commercial beekeepers do to reduce the risk of queen loss
after the first year (normally they live 2-4 years).

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sleavey
I remember reading the same Roald Dahl short story about Royal Jelly as part
of a book called The Great Automatic Grammatizator. His short stories were all
great reads for an early teenager.

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DelightOne
It‘s facinating to read about bees since without them food production would
plummet and famine would set in.

I read that a simple system only has so many ways to adapt and a complex
system has many more and so has a better chance to survive(„nature finds its
way“).

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DiabloD3
Aaand now I want to know if his hive survived. Thanks Nautilus.

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tofof
Enjoyed this back in 2014 when it was written.

