Bee Royalty:

Bees have a strict caste system.

Of the tens of thousands of bees found in hives, nearly all are workers, performing virtually every task, from cleaning and building the hive to collecting pollen and nectar.

Their lives are so intense that a winter worker can live for 4 to 9 months, while a worker born during the summer peak season can only live about 6 weeks before dying from exhaustion.

Not what we imagined right?

It's not that good, it's basically of 300-3000 male bees hanging around in the summer waiting to mate with the queen.

They then die or are thrown out of their nests, rendering them useless in the fall.

Then there's this queen.

There is one per nest and they can live up to 5 years.

She lays up to 2,000 eggs in her day.

And its entire existence is thanks to a bitter, protein-rich secretion called royal jelly.

Due to her long lifespan and unique position, a new queen is rarely needed, but if a queen dies or leaves her nest with the flock, the colony will quickly find a replacement to replace her.

I have to find the queen.

In either of her situations, a bee cub is selected as the new queen.

The science of how and why this happens is still not fully understood, but one thing is for sure: royal she-jelly plays a big role.

The worker bees produce royal jelly from a gland in their heads called the hypopharynx and feed it to newly hatched honey bee larvae.

The milky yellow substance consists of digested pollen and honey or nectar.

Not only is it rich in protein, royal jelly also contains a combination of vitamins, especially B vitamins, lipids, sugars, hormones, and minerals such as potassium, magnesium, calcium, and iron.

This bee "superfood" also contains acetylcholine, her neurotransmitter, which is also present in humans.

It is the function of nerves to tell muscles to start or stop movement, and they also contribute to learning.

All of these nutrients may explain why royal jelly is often marketed as an expensive all-purpose dietary supplement, even though research has not proven that royal jelly has any significant effects on the human body.

There is a possibility, after all, we are not bees.

However, there are many benefits for the bee, and things get interesting on his third day on the royal jelly diet.

The 4,444 worker bees select some larvae to continue feeding them royal jelly, while all other larvae are switched to a less nutritious diet of 4,444 honey pollen and water.

As the future Queen's Gorge, royal jelly triggers other developmental stages that workers do not experience, such as the formation of ovaries for spawning.

If Queen emerges first, she will seek out and destroy all other queens still developing at in their wax chambers.

If multiple queens appear at the same time, they will fight to the death until only one of her queens remains.

We don't know exactly which worker bees decide which larvae receive the royal she- treatment, but for a long time we thought it was a coincidence.

This makes sense because worker and queen bees are essentially genetically identical.

But there is evidence in her 4,444 cases that the queen's selection may not be so random.

A 2011 study found that future queen larvae have higher levels of a protein that increases metabolic activity, so there is actually a small genetic difference between her that could play a major role.

There is a possibility that it is playing a role.

Scientists are also still trying to figure out what it is about the royal jelly that lets it change a larva's whole life. For a while we thought it might be a hormone in the jelly or the way it affected insulin signals in the larvae then another 2011 study zeroed in on a protein called ROYALACTIN which when isolated and combined with other nutrients can transform larvae into queens just like royal jelly.

Once they emerge Queens continue eating royal jelly their entire lives and given that the Queen lives a lot longer than the thousands of relatives around her, it sounds like a reasonable dietary choice for a royal bee to make.