A queen bee can live four or five years. Almost none do. In a managed hive she is usually replaced by her second summer, and often by her first. This page is about why that gap exists, and how to tell which side of it your queen is on.
One week of mating, years of laying
A queen starts out as the same egg as a worker. The only difference is how much royal jelly she is fed, and what kind. Feed a larva the richer diet for longer and you get a queen.
She mates once in her life, in the first week or two after she emerges. She flies out on a warm afternoon to a drone congregation area, which is a spot in the sky where drones gather. She mates with a dozen or more of them in the air, and comes home. She stores that sperm in her body and draws on it for the rest of her life. She never mates again.
We went looking for those areas at a field day here. We put virgin queens in cages, tied the cages to helium balloons, and floated them up on a fishing line. About 30 to 40 metres up, the drones found them. One congregation area turned out to be behind a tree line on our own farm. Emily tells the story on the Farming in British Columbia podcast, in The Queen Bee (Breeder) of Spallumcheen.
From then on her job is eggs. At the height of a BC June she can lay 1,500 or more a day, which is more than her own body weight in eggs every day. She is fed and groomed by a ring of workers who never leave her. She does nothing else.
That is the whole life of a queen: a few flights, then years in the dark laying eggs. It is also why she wears out. The sperm supply is finite. Her egg-laying slows. And the colony notices before you do.
What a queen looks like
Most new beekeepers cannot find the queen, and most experienced ones cannot find her fast. Here is what to look for.
Her abdomen is the tell. It is long and tapered, and it extends well past the tips of her wings, so her wings look short even though they are not. Workers’ wings reach the end of their bodies. Drones are stockier, with big eyes that meet on top of the head. The queen has neither the stocky build nor the big eyes.
She walks differently. Slower, with her legs splayed. Workers scatter as she moves and turn to face her. Look for a small open circle in the crowd on the comb. She is often in the middle of it.
Her thorax (the middle section, where the wings attach) is smooth and a little shiny, where workers’ are fuzzy. And she has no pollen baskets on her back legs, because she has never carried pollen and never will.
If she is marked, none of this matters. A marked queen has a dot of paint on her thorax. Breeders use an international colour code that tells you what year she was raised: white for years ending in 1 or 6, yellow for 2 or 7, red for 3 or 8, green for 4 or 9, blue for 5 or 0. A queen raised in 2026 wears white. So a marked queen also tells you her age at a glance, which is the main reason to buy one marked.
How a queen declines
A queen rarely fails all at once. Long before she does, the colony starts to work around her.
The first sign is the brood pattern. A young queen lays in a tight spiral from the centre of the comb outward, so capped brood sits in a solid block with almost no empty cells. As she ages, the pattern goes spotty. Cells get skipped. Eggs get laid and then removed by workers who can tell something is off.
Then the drone brood creeps in. A queen chooses whether to fertilize each egg, and only fertilized eggs become workers. When her stored sperm starts to run out, more eggs go unfertilized, and you see drone brood (the domed, bullet-shaped cappings) scattered through the worker comb. A queen that lays only drones is called a drone layer, and the colony is finished unless you step in.
Somewhere in there, the bees decide for themselves. They raise a handful of queen cells, usually on the face of the comb and not along the bottom edge, and replace her. Beekeepers call it supersedure. It works often enough in the wild. In a managed hive it is slow, and it costs a month of brood. The new queen also mates with whatever drones happen to be around. Those may or may not be bees you would have chosen.
When to requeen
Most beekeepers who keep bees for a living replace queens every year or two, on a schedule, whether the queen looks tired or not. That is not waste. A queen in her first full season lays the most, swarms the least, and heads a colony that goes into winter strongest. Every season after that is a small step down, and the step is hard to see until it has cost you something.
Hobbyists tend to wait for a reason. Here are the reasons.
The brood pattern has gone spotty and stayed spotty across two inspections.
The hive swarmed. The queen that stays behind after a swarm is a new virgin, and you have no idea who she mated with.
The colony is hot. Temperament comes from the queen, so a hive that has turned mean gets a new queen, and the difference shows within six weeks as the old bees die off.
You want different bees. Gentler ones, or bees that winter better here. The only way to change the genetics of a hive is to change the queen.
The timing matters as much as the reason. A queen introduced in late July or early August has time to lay the winter bees, the long-lived workers that carry the colony to March. A queen introduced in September does not. Spring requeening works too, especially with a queen that has already overwintered, which is what heads our early nucleus colonies.
Why buyers replace queens
Put the pieces together and you get the reason most of our queens leave the farm. A beekeeper with a strong hive and a two year old queen is looking at a colony that will slide next year. It may swarm. It may supersede itself with a queen of unknown parentage. A young mated queen from stock that has already wintered in the BC interior gives that hive a fresh start. The beekeeper picks the bee and does not leave it to chance.
We rear ours here, from a line bred on this farm for years. We catch each queen after she starts laying, so we see her laying pattern before she ships. They ship across Canada by Canada Post and courier from early May to about August 10, one at a time or by the hundred. Details and the order form are on the queen bees page.
What one costs, and what the price does and does not include, is on what a queen bee costs in Canada.