Quarterly Beekeeping Newsletter - Spring 2025
Grai St. Clair Rice- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
Pheromones on the Breeze
Spring is in the air with unblushing abandon. The seduction of flowers is everywhere. Wafting bouquets of sweetness fill the breeze with nuance.
In the honeybee world, swarm season offers its own unique bouquets in the form of pheromones, both within and outside the hive.
Pheromones play a vital role in the life of a honeybee colony. These chemical signals, produced by different glands, provide a means of communication for the cohesive functioning and homeostasis of the colony, as well as the continuance of the species through their function in the reproductive life of colonies.
A colony’s queen, with her complex mix of pheromones called the “Queen Signal,” is the main regulator of the activities within the hive. A strong “signal” stimulates foraging, brood-rearing and comb building, and maintains the reproductive supremacy of the queen.
The bouquet of virgins are dynamic, evolving sensory signals...
During swarm season, when new virgin queens are emerging, the “bouquet” of their queen pheromones is a dynamic, evolving sensory signal. Initially, a virgin needs to be accepted by the workers, be victorious in battles with other virgins, and then be fed while her physiology matures. A virgin reaches sexual maturity at 5 - 10 days old, when she initiates her mating flights, exuding chemical volatiles to seduce the drones.
A virgin is ripe with Queen Mandibular Pheromone (QMP) saturated with specific compounds attractive to drones in flight. The components and levels of QMP shift once a queen is mated and reigns the hive. Once she is actively laying, other glands and secretions are also engaged to influence the colony’s workers.
Drones, in Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs), exhibit their own “drone odor bouquet” en masse, which lures virgins to the mating area. A virgin will streak through the congregation of drones, leaving a trail of pheromones for them to follow. Volatile, seductive molecules on the breeze everywhere, in a bouquet of pheromones.
Spring Beekeeping Tasks
Split Strong Colonies Before They Swarm
Creating a manual swarm, moving the established queen into a new hive box, can help you retain your bees. You can always merge them again later, if you don’t want to expand your yard.
Create Small Colonies with Queen Cells
Protect Hives Against Robbing
Monitor and Treat for Mites Early
Plant a Flowering Tree or Shrub
Make sure your hives are level after winter
Queen Status Identification
A virgin queen has distinct traits that can be observed and is physically and behaviorally different from a reigning queen. For a beekeeper inspecting a hive, these are helpful to take note of.
A newly emerged virgin has to carry out a hunt-and-kill mission against other potential virgins in order to establish her place in the hive. Piping and quacking of queens in a hive alert others to the existence and battle call of emerging queens.
Virgins will not be surrounded by a retinue of workers that are feeding and preening her. She will be dashing around the hive in a determined frenzy. Once other virgins have been eliminated, she can get her bearings walking around the hive while she matures for mating.
A virgin will exhibit a triangular shaped abdomen
Her abdomen will have a triangular shape to it, unlike the elongated abdomen of a mated queen full of eggs and semen. Kate Anton, in the Grozinger Lab at Penn State, photographed the same queen, first in her virgin state and then in her mated state to illustrate the different abdominal shapes.
Beekeepers often get anxious when a change of queen is occurring in a colony. Anything can happen to her on mating flights, keeping a queen from safely returning to her hive. Additionally, mating with multiple drones with sufficient genetic diversity is not a given depending on surrounding colonies.
Once mated, there is time required as the new queen continues to raise her level of Vitellogenin (Vg), develops her eggs, and establishes her “plumbing” of oviduct and spermatheca for depositing fertile versus infertile eggs.
When egg laying commences, there is another wait until the first worker brood is capped before a beekeeper can exude a sigh of relief that the new queen is well on her way.
Queen Pheromone Influence
A reigning honey bee queen is the main influencer in a colony. The workers collectively are the decision-makers in the hive; however, the queen is their reason for being and doing. All animals communicate via pheromones, which are chemical signals that influence the behavior of another individual, as opposed to hormones that are chemical signals that act inside that individual animal.
In the publication Neurobiology of Chemical Communication, Drs. Laura Bortolotti and Cecilia Costa, from the Apidology Research Group, clearly explain, “In honey bees, as in other animals, there are two types of pheromones: primer pheromones and releaser pheromones. Primer pheromones act at a physiological level, triggering complex and long-term responses in the receiver and generating both developmental and behavioral changes. Releaser pheromones have a weaker effect, generating a simple and transitory response that influences the receiver only at the behavioral level.”
When a colony loses its queen, the activity in the hive becomes scrambled. Sometimes the colony becomes lethargic, or seemingly hopeless and screaming. Sometimes multiple laying workers activate their infertile ovaries to lay drone eggs in hopes of sustaining the colony to no avail; however, the energy in the hive will usually be off.
As a beekeeper, once you become familiar with the natural vibration and activity of a healthy hive, you will know when to question if something is wrong by watching and listening. If there is a healthy queen and enough food for brood, every bee has a task, and the hive hums along, communicating as they do so well via pheromones and vibration.
Enjoy the exciting newness of the season!
Watching the entrances of your hives often tells you a lot about the energy inside, before you open them. Limit your time inside the hives for the bees' well-being.
Join us for an exciting upcoming Beekeeping Season at the CBA Bee Yard
Beekeeping Newsletter Citations & Links
Adapted from Goodman, L. (2003) Form and Function in the Honey Bee.Cardiff, UK: IBRA.) Permission: Chemical Communication in the Honey Bee Society, Laura Bortolotti and Cecilia Costa.
Anton, K. (2022, December 8). An Introduction to Queen Honey Bee Development. Penn State Extension.
Bastin, F., Cholé, H., Lafon, G. et al. Virgin queen attraction toward males in honey bees. Sci Rep 7, 6293 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-06241-9
Neurobiology of Chemical Communication. Mucignat-Caretta C, editor. Boca Raton (FL): CRC Press/Taylor & Francis; 2014. Chapter 5: Chemical Communication in the Honey Bee Society, Laura Bortolotti and Cecilia Costa.
About the Author:
Grai St. Clair Rice
Grai has been a beekeeping educator since 2006. She teaches beekeeping classes, coaches beekeepers, does public presentations, writes about Honeybees and gardening for pollinators, and consults on landscape plantings.
