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The bee colony's first activity of swarm preparation is to reduce the brood volume by creating additional stores inside the brood area. As brood emerges, selected cells are back-filled with honey, nectar, or pollen. Later into the season, as space for egg laying decreases the queen will not be able to lay as many eggs.
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.
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.
Ant colonies have a complex social structure. Ants’ jobs are determined and can be changed by age. As ants grow older their jobs move them farther from the queen, or center of the colony. Younger ants work within the nest protecting the queen and young. Sometimes, a queen is not present and is replaced by egg-laying workers.
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.
From this point the queen continuously lays eggs which hatch into larvae, exclusively destined to develop into worker ants. [5] 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.
A mated gyne is a potential queen that will either disperse to a new nest, succeed to the position of the former nest queen, or suffer subordination or harm by the current queen. [6] In a mating season, a eusocial halictine queen usually lays multiple broods, with earlier broods composed of dominantly female workers and later broods of ...
The queen is the sole survivor of her colony after 9 months of hibernation during the winter. [6] In the Arctic, only one queen per colony on average will survive the winter to renew the next life cycle. [6] The colony only has one or two months to complete the social cycle of two generations. [6] The old queen dies with her progeny. [6]