How do queen ants lay their eggs?

Answer 1

Strangely, it is the workers, not the queen, that determine a particular egg should develop into a queen.

When the colony decides that more queens are needed, either in preparation to swarm or to replace the old queen they will prepare queen cells which are larger than the usual brood cell and the queen will lay an egg in them, or if the queen has died the workers will draw a queen cell out over a recently laid egg or very young larva.

All larvae are fed with a substance called royal jelly for the first two or three days. Worker larvae are then weaned on to a mixture of pollen and honey. However, if a larva is fed royal jelly for the whole of its larval life until pupation it will develop into a queen.

Answer 2

A queen will only mate once in her life, a week or so after she emerges from the pupal cell. She mates with a number of drones -- anything from half a dozen to twenty -- and stores the sperm in a special organ called a spermetheca. As the queen lays an egg she has the choice to to fertilize it by releasing a very small number of sperm directly on to the egg, in which case the egg will develop into a female; or not fertilize it, in which case the egg will develop into a male.
A queen does not lay eggs at the same rate throughout the year. In late spring and early summer when the colony is building up at its fastest rate she will be laying up to 2,000 eggs a day. In winter, she will be laying very few eggs, if any at all.
The spermetheca can hold enough sperm for the queens entire laying life: usually around three years, but can be anything between two and five years. The other wonder is that the queen can keep the sperm alive and nourished for this length of time.

Answer 3

A queen bee is definitely not a free agent, and every detail of her existence is controlled by the colony. She has been chosen to be a queen by being fed a special diet, along with several other spare queen larvae.

First to hatch, her #1 job is to kill off any other queen hatchlings, though this job will continue after she has been on her mating flight..

Next job is to make her mating flight when she will mate with several drones, who die immediately as a result of the process. (But are presumably happy!)

The queen returns to her hive, and is now put to work by the colony bees to her task of laying up to 2000 eggs per day. These are extruded from her body in the usual insect maner. Usually these eggs are unfertilized and will produce only female worker bees. Possibly because of the shape of the particular cell in the honeycomb, she sometimes is made to lay fertile eggs, which become males. In any event, this process is entirely under the control of the colony, with her attendants feeding her the special queen diet.

The worker bees gather nectar from flowers, and a sticky dark brown material called propolis, which is used for sealing cracks etc to make the hive weatherproof. The propolis is a gummy substance gathered from plant leaves and the outside of flowers. [This material is gathered by beekeepers by inserting a small tube through the wall of the hive. The bees obediently fill it with propolis.]

The workers tend to gather only one type of nectar at a time, and these are segregated in the hive. Similarly with pollen they gather from the flowers- each type is kept separate. We know however, that stray pollen sicking to the body hairs of the bees is not brushed off, and in the honey is of value in identifying any poisonous (to us) honey the bees have gathered. [In NZ, the nectar from Tutu plant is poisonous to humans] The other product the workers make is beeswax, from the older bees. Our most wondrous insect.

Enjoy your honey.

Answer 4

Queens mate and they birth by growing a HUGE "tail like structure" that holds many eggs, up to like 140. Then the ants go pop out the back aftr a couple weeks