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.
Plebeia remota
A study showed that a typical nest would rear between 1-5 gynes during an observation period that varied between 6 and 18 months. However, it was also noted that on occasion "P. remota" may produce a high number of gynes, up to 46. Another thing to note is that gynes can be produced in the same cells that give rise to the worker class. The only difference between the queen and the workers is that queens are generally bigger, however this is not always the case since it has been documented that queens can be the same size as the workers. The same study also showed that there is no correlation between the queen's size and whether they are accepted or have a successful mating. Queens emerge always attractive, meaning that they cause changes in the intranidal behavior of the workers. Normally after gynes are produced, a majority of them are killed by the workers. The ones that survive can be kept alive in cerumen chambers protected by a barrier of wax called the royal camber. It is those survivors who will go on and form new colonies.