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.
Bombus fervidus
"Bombus fervidus" queens lay eggs individually in cells within the nest that she builds herself. She first lays 8-10 eggs, one in each cell. When these eggs hatch, the larvae emerge and feed on honey for growth. The queen makes the honey for the larvae until they are ready to pupate, which is when the larva create cocoons for themselves where they stay to metamorphose into adults. Metamorphosis typically takes 16 to 25 days. Once the adults bees emerge from the cocoon, they are adult workers. This first generation of the brood that becomes workers are responsible for feeding the next generation of developing larvae and the queen. This ensures that the queen can focus on laying more eggs. Thus, each generation of "B. fervidus" is larger than the one before it.