We all know that worker bees can sting. That fact is well known. But can a queen bee sting? Not everyone knows about it. So let us look at the question do queen bees sting?
Does the queen bee have a stinger?
The answer to this question is yes. That means she can sting. But she does it in a different way than worker bees, for defence in case of danger and penetration of the hive. The queen uses her sting to fight other queen bees when they are found together in the same hive.
Fight for survival
Bees have learnt to survive over many millions of years and so they are used to fierce competition. The queen bee’s principle is to remain the only one in the hive. To do this, she needs a sting.
When a bee builds queen cells to breed a new queen, the first queen that emerges first looks for other queen cells, of which there are several, in order to take advantage and kill the potential competitors that are inside. That’s what she needs the sting for. The queen chews through the hostile queen cell and stings the competitor to death.
In the case when two queens appear at the same time, there is a fight between them, in which they try to sting each other to death.
Features of the queen bee’s sting
A queen bee differs from worker bee. A queen can use her sting more than once.
The reason for this is the structure of her sting. The queen’s sting is curved and smooth, with only three barbs on it. This allows the sting to be pulled out of the victim without damaging its internal organs.
In worker bees, the sting has many barbs, which, when penetrated, make it impossible to pull the sting back out, and it remains in the victim’s body along with part of the internal organs to which it is attached.
Can a queen bee sting a human?
For humans, the bee queen is practically safe. The point is that it all depends on whether the queen is fertile or not. Usually, an unfertile queen (in beekeepers’ slang, this is a young queen that has not been fertilised yet) can sting a person in case of extreme danger, but she does it very rarely. In spite of its impressive size, compared to a normal worker bee, a sting from a queen does not threaten you with anything – at most redness at the sting site.
But a fertile queen never stings a human being. I can confirm this fact from personal experience – once I had to catch a queen who was about to fly away from me with the swarm. In theory, I knew that the queen would not bite, but the fear remained. That day I managed to gently catch the queen bee in my fist, leaving a little space in it. A normal bee would have stung me long ago, but not the queen, she waited obediently for me to transfer her to the cell.
This “friendliness” of the queen towards humans is mainly due to the fact that the sting of the queen is also an egg-layer. And since there is someone in the hive to protect the family from attack, the queen does not risk using her sting. In spite of this design of the sting, there is a risk of injury.
Conclusion
A queen bee plays a very important role in the hive. She is one for the entire hive, which can reach up to 100,000 bees. In the event of her death, the entire bee colony may die. Because of this, the worker bees take care of their queen, feeding her, cleaning her. Therefore, she takes care of herself and uses her sting only against other queen bees when necessary.
