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.
Mischocyttarus drewseni
Once wasps emerge as mature adults, they spend the first 2–3 days on the nest doing very little. After the first 3 idle days, workers can be told from non-workers because workers stay on the nest longer. A wasp that leaves the nest for any reason immediately after those 3 days is considered a non-worker. Lifetime in the nest, then, seems directly dependent on ones role: queens lived an average of 61 days, workers lived about 31 days, non-workers survived for about 5 days, and males only survived about 4.8 days. This is considered evidence that the caste system determines the individual wasp’s life course. Note that these numbers are based entirely on the number of days that a wasp is seen in the nest. In some cases, including males, the wasps live the majority of their lives outside of the nest.