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.
Dolichovespula adulterina
Regardless of the host species, the queen "D. adulterina "invades the host colony around the same time that the first workers start to emerge. The invasive queen waits approximately 10 days before killing the host queen and laying her eggs. Males emerge in late July and new queens emerge in early August. After a few days, the males and females will leave for their mating flights. The colony then terminates in mid-August. The inquiline queen dies by mid-July, if not earlier from fights with host workers. After the colony ceases, the queen will enter hibernation in a sheltered area. She will then emerge and feed on nectar and malaxate arthropods until she attempts to usurp a host colony. On average, the colony cycle for a successful parasitic queen is about 2.8 months.