A mated honeybee queen is the colony's single reproductive female. She spends her days walking the comb, dipping her abdomen into cell after cell to lay one egg at a time — at her peak, up to 2,000 eggs a day, close to her own body weight. At the same time her mandibular glands release queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), a blend that workers pick up by touch and pass hive-wide through trophallaxis (mouth-to-mouth food sharing). QMP is what keeps a colony of tens of thousands of sterile workers cooperating: it suppresses their ovaries, stabilises foraging behaviour, and holds the swarm together in flight.
A queen mates in flight with 10–20 drones on one or two mating flights in her first couple of weeks of life, storing enough sperm in her spermatheca to fertilise eggs for the rest of her multi-year lifespan — she never mates again.
Watch a mated queen walk the comb laying eggs cell by cell while her queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) radiates outward and a retinue of workers relays it hive-wide — then remove her and watch the signal fade and emergency queen cells begin to rise.
QMP concentration controls how tightly the retinue orbits the queen and how far the pheromone cloud spreads; removing the queen lets the signal decay, dispersing workers and triggering emergency queen-cell construction at the comb margin.
Adjust egg-laying rate, pheromone strength and retinue size, then toggle the queen present/removed to see the colony's chemical and behavioural response in real time.
A queen mates just once in her life, on one or two flights, storing enough sperm to fertilise eggs for years — after that, everything the colony does to keep her alive and signalling is existential.