Question: how long does the queen in a hive stay as queen and how is the next queen choosen?

Roberto answered on 11 Nov 2018:

The queen can live up to 4 years, but into a hive, there are different cases in which a queen need to be replaced even before she died:
– there are too many bees in the hive, so they decide is time to split the colony in two. The queen leaves the hive with half of the bees to start a new colony and the remaining bees start to rais a new queen in the hive.
– the queen is not very healthy or she is not a good queen because lays not enough eggs to sustain the colony population, therefore the bees decide to replace her and start to rais a new queen.

now, how a new queen is raised?
A queen bee is a worker bee which has been fed with royal jelly food since she was in the larval stage, whereas any other worker larvae are fed with pollen and nectar. This particular diet allows the larva to fully develop as a queen. The royal jelly is a substance produced by particular honeybee present in the hive, and its composition is something that scientist haven’t be able to fully discover.

Now, It remains also a mystery how a larva is chosen to become the new queen, apparently is just a random selection. To be completely correct, I should tell you that normally the bees start to rais different queen at the same time, when they need one, and only the one who hatched first will become the queen, all the other will be killed before hatching.