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All brood rearing stops for some period during the winter. In early spring, brood rearing resumes inside the winter cluster when the queen starts to lay eggs again. Once a brood nest is established, the cluster must maintain a steady temperature between 34.5 and 36.7 °C (94.1 and 98.1 °F) inside the cluster.
Brood frames usually have some pollen and nectar or honey in the upper corners of the frame. The rest of the brood frame cells may be empty or occupied by brood in various developmental stages. During the brood raising season, the bees may reuse the cells from which brood has emerged for additional brood or convert it to honey or pollen storage.
Once the first brood has emerged, the colony enters the worker phase. In this phase, queens will stop foraging and stay in the nest. The workers put pollen and nectar into the cells of the nest where the queen can lay her eggs. This phase can last for one to three broods depending on the length of the season.
While some colonies live in hives provided by humans, so-called "wild" colonies (although all honey bees remain wild, even when cultivated and managed by humans) typically prefer a nest site that is clean, dry, protected from the weather, about 20 litres (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 US gal) in volume with a 4–6 cm 2 (0.62–0.93 sq in) entrance about 3 ...
The queen usually nurses the first brood alone. After the first workers appear, the queen's role in the colony typically becomes one of exclusive (and generally continuous) egg-laying. For an example of a colony founding process, see Atta sexdens .
Once the brood is provisioned, the queen seals the nest synchronously with all other queens in the aggregation, and all above-ground activity ceases for three weeks. [ 9 ] Larvae from the earliest eggs are full grown and start pupation by the end of May in Central Europe (or much earlier in warmer climates), emerging from their cells by mid-June.
The brood chamber is surrounded by the involucrum, which is a multilayered envelope. T. hockingsi constructs brood combs during the Provisioning and Ovipositioning Process (POP). First, workers construct a new brood cell and provision the cell with liquid food. Next, the queen lays an egg in the provisioned cell on top of the food.
Queens will also engage in dominance actions to assert dominance over the nest such as brood cannibalism of other queens' brood. [2] When the most fertile queen in the nest decides to directly challenge another queen, it is usually the initiating queen that wins and takes control of the colony, turning it into a one queen colony. [ 5 ]