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.
Paratrigona subnuda
Daughter queen bees, also known as gynes, leave the colony for the new colony during nesting. This is partly due to the physogastric queens who are unable to move to swarm to the new colony. There is also contact between the mother queen and the new queen that can last for weeks or months. This phenomenon is a consequence of "P. subnuda"'s single mate behaviors. Under single mating, there is lower conflict between daughter and mother queens. This is due to the fact that there is increased relatedness between daughter queen and the mother queen’s progeny. When males are produced by the queen, workers will shift their interest to the daughter queen because they have higher relatedness to the new queen’s sons. Unlike other tropical bees, stingless bee colonies only reproduce once a year or sometimes even less.