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.
Liometopum apiculatum
A study by Conconi "et al." (1983a) recorded the longevity of each of the reproductive castes and colony foundation of "L. apiculatum". In this study, they studied the life cycle of this species under different conditions of humidity, temperature, and substrate. Ant queens were placed either in glass tubes with moist cotton or in jars with soil, and were held at varying temperatures and relative humidity. Observations of the longevity of the various reproductive castes of "L. apiculatum" are as follows: males lived 15 to 37 days, virgin queens lived 19 to 268 days and fertilized queens lived 17 to 316 days. However, the last estimate is incredibly short for a queen, so either these ants are highly polygynous or they live much longer in the wild.