Beekeeping
The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and male drones are her offspring. The queen may live for up to three years or more and may be capable of laying half a million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding season, late spring to summer, a good queen may be capable of laying 3,000 eggs in one day, more than her own body weight. This would be exceptional however; a prolific queen might peak at 2,000 eggs a day, but a more average queen might lay just 1,500 eggs per day. The queen is raised from a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of royal jelly than a normal worker bee, resulting in a radically different growth and metamorphosis. The queen influences the colony by the production and dissemination of a variety of pheromones or "queen substances". One of these chemicals suppresses the development of ovaries in all the female worker bees in the hive and prevents them from laying eggs.
Trigona fuscipennis
The queen is the mother and the only bee in the hive that reproduces. Males are only produced when new queens are produced. Males and new queens leave the nest to find mates and then the males die and the mated queens start their own hive. Virgin queens accompany swarms of workers to new nest sites and males wait in anticipation, picking up on the odors the queen disperses throughout the nest. The new queen flies out for mating and is pursued by hundreds of males. The queen puts herself at risk during these matings as it exposes her to predation and many are killed.