In honeybees - I’m assuming all of the above is talking about honeybees, other bees are up to totally different shit - workers and queens are both genetically female, but have extremely different life histories.
Larvae assigned to become queens are fed royal jelly until pupation, the high level of nutrition as well as hormonal cues leading to full ovarian development, on the order of a million eggs. After emerging as adults, they take a nuptial flight, mating with as many drones as possible and storing a lifetime supply of sperm. In good conditions, a queen can live 3 to 5 years. Good conditions depend, among other things, on how successfully she has mated. If she starts to run out of sperm, and thus begins laying too many unfertilized drone eggs and too few workers, the workers will kill her and raise a replacement. Drones in honeybee hives don’t participate in foraging or other hive activities, so there is a limited ratio of drones a hive can support, relative to workers.
Larvae assigned to become workers are fed royal jelly for about three days, then weaned onto pollen. Ovarian development is extremely limited - possibly 1 in 10,000 workers will have any viable eggs, and likely less than 100 eggs in total. As workers do not go on nuptial flights, any eggs they lay will be unfertilized, therefore drones. Workers do lay these eggs, often at the periphery of the hive, but they are usually removed and destroyed by other workers - a phenomenon known as “worker policing.”
In summer, workers live for about 4 to 6 weeks. They go through a sequence of “jobs”, which can be tracked developmentally by the activation of different glands: brood tending (royal jelly produced), hive construction (wax produced), foraging (venom production begins), hive defense (venom production peaks). This work - especially foraging - is very metabolically intensive, which is often thought to account for the shorter lifespan. The cohort of workers who overwinter enter a state of suspended development, and survive about 6 months, until spring.
The pheromones produced by the queen do significantly influence worker behavior, and part of this influence is a suppression of egg laying among workers, although the data on this are not entirely clear-cut. What’s more notable is that, in the absence of queen pheromones, the hive will immediately pivot to trying to raise a new queen.
When queens are produced in anticipation of a swarm, the large cells in which they develop (queen cups) are built onto the bottom of the comb. In a sudden absence of queen pheromones, workers will remodel the comb around any cell with an unhatched fertile (aka female) egg. They will raise as many queen potentials as possible, keeping them apart from each other so they don’t kill each other, choosing which to kill after they’ve returned from their mating flights.
If you view the whole hive as an organism, the queen is not only responsible for the hive’s reproduction, she is also its only mechanism of cell replacement. During peak season, the queen lays about 2,000 eggs per day, most of them destined to be workers. Workers can’t lay workers, and without workers, the hive dies.
If the process of requeening fails, worker policing usually ends: workers will lay whatever eggs they have, will stop destroying each others eggs, and will raise the resulting drones to send out into the world. This is a dead end for the hive, but reproductively speaking, it’s a last change to get the hive’s genetics to continue by mating with some other queen.
So. The difference between workers and queens is not *just* fertility, they lead functionally completely different lives. An adult worker cannot become a queen. Egg laying by workers is somewhat supressed by the queen’s pheremones, but more actively so by other workers. In some conditions, workers do participate in sexual reproduction, if somewhat indirectly.
What does that mean for gender analogies? I don’t know. I think it’s worth noting that literature on bees doesn’t refer to the categories of worker, queen, drone as genders or even as sexes, but as castes. Which brings in a whole other facet of social analogy which has been projected onto bees - that of politics, and decision making as a hive.
Personally I get antsy about descriptions of hive behavior that focus on the desires or actions of any individual bee. That includes the queen: she’s not actually in charge of anything! She is singular and critical to the hive, but that doesn’t make her any kind of administrator. The processes of the hive - the organization of the comb, the location of the brood, the number of workers, drones, and queens raised - all of these are shaped by many small and seemingly inconsequential actions taken by individual bees. What is currently in the comb effects what gets put where in the comb, a physical instantiation of hive memory. Where the queen lays depends on where her entorage steers her, whether she lays fertile eggs or drones depends mostly on whether she’s laying into a larger drone cell or not, although she also seems able to chose of her own accord. There’s a lot of ambiguity and complexity in the decision making of individual bees and of the hive as a whole. Some limited parts of it are well understood, but much isn’t.
The workers respond to the queen’s pheromones by fawning over her and tending to her every need. Except, sometimes, they will kill her. What makes the difference? How does a worker decide? It isn’t random, it’s related to contexts such as choosing between several mated potential queens, or removing a queen who isn’t laying well. But what does this possibility of queen killing say about the mind-control effect attributed to her pheromones? What can we say about what a worker bee knows, percieves, or wants?
Bumblebees have much smaller colonies, with a looser organizational structure. They are also much less well researched. As far as I can find, in most bumblebee species, the worker/queen distinction is fuzzier. A queen overwinters, in spring she establishes a nest, doing her own foraging. The first few workers she lays emerge small, due to limited resources. As the season goes on, the colony rears larger workers, at some point some of them are fertile - that is, queens. They also lay in parallel to their mother queen, within the same nest. Towards late summer, the colony puts more resources to raising exceptionally large queens, who will be able to survive the winter and establish next years colonies. In this case, the distinction between queens and workers is more directly one of nourishment and resource allocation. And, the role of queen is less seperate - queens also participate in foraging, at least at certain times of year.
Bumblebees also handle their drones differently. In honeybees, drones return to the hive in the evening to be fed and cared for (much like queens!) In bumblebees, males set off on their own once mature. You’ll often find them sleeping on flowers, where they can find an easy breakfast in the morning and perhaps encounter a queen to mate with.
