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.
Black queen cell virus
Black Queen Cell Virus was originally described in 1977, but its genome was not sequenced until 2000. BQCV can currently be found most commonly in Australia and parts of South Africa. BQCV visibly affects the pupae of queen bees, causing them first to turn yellow and then black, and eventually die. These pupae come from queen bees that seem healthy and show no symptoms of being infected with this virus, as it only manifests itself with visible symptoms in the larvae. Although only the larvae are visibly affected by this disease, adults can also be infected, but asymptomatically. Transmission occurs by a parasite called "Nosema apis", which lives in the intestines of honey bees. BQCV can also be transmitted from nurse bees to larvae when they feed, and from hive to hive when the bees travel between them and when infected queen bees are distributed to other hives, There are no vaccines or treatment forms available to treat bees infected with this virus, therefore sanitation is the best way to prevent the spread. Sanitation practices include replacing the comb of the hive and requeening. Requeening simply means that the queen of the hive is replaced with a new, and in the case of infected hives, healthy queen.