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.
Lasioglossum sordidum
Overwinter females that have been fertilized stay in nests, coming out in late winter as the ground begins to get warmer. During the winter prepupae are in moist soils to survive the cold temperatures, in late spring and early summer new males and females begin to appear, being active during the warmer months. An individual bee is unlikely to live longer than eight weeks. Due to the lengthy time they spend nesting they forage on a wide range of flowering plants. "Lasioglossum sordidum" are described to have a eusocial life cycle this means that there is a mix of juveniles and adults. Eusociality is used by all bees as a system to raise young. There is limited social organization shown within the behaviours of the bee as they are usually solitary however females forage from one nest.