Page 65 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

Harun Yahya 63

her clean. In short, the queen does not involve in anything regarding her
own care, because her only duty is to lay eggs to perpetuate the hive.

The Queen: A Rather Different Bee
The queen bee is set apart from the other bees right from her larval
stage. Queens are raised in different combs with different features from
those of the other bees. This site where the queen is raised consists of spe-
cial cells hanging upside down from the comb. Since she is larger than the
other bees, these cells are also constructed on a larger scale. 44
As has been emphasized in earlier sections, there is no difference be-
tween the egg that hatches into a queen and an egg that produces the
workers. The queen is the result of spe-
cial feeding with royal jelly over her
six-day larval period, and emerges
not as an ordinary female worker,
but as one very different in terms of
appearance and function. Workers
are fed royal jelly for only three days,
but the queen receives it for the full
six days of her larval stage. 45
The ingredients and amount of
the royal jelly given to the queen are
specially regulated. Research has es-
tablished that while other bees are
only given 3 milligrams throughout
their larval stage, the queen is given
10 milligrams. Simply on account of
The larvae of queen bees are
this difference in feeding, the queen
raised in special brood cells.
and a worker emerge as two very dif-
ferent creatures, with very different
morphological characteristics from one another. 46

Adnan Oktar