Cordovan queen lays up to 2,000 eggs a day

A Cordovan queen, an egg laying machine

Here you can see a fertile queen and some of her eggs in the bottom of the honeycomb cell. The egg appears as a tiny grain of rice standing on end. Three days after being laid, it will lay down and hatch into a larva. After five more days of being fed, it will be sealed behind a wax capping and pupate, making about 80 somersaults and spinning a cocoon. On day 21 she will hatch out as a fully formed worker bee, preprogrammed with the instincts which she needs to perform the many different jobs she will do in the colony.

A queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day, perhaps 500,000 offspring produced over her lifetime of several years. She is the mother of the entire colony. She usually has mated with from 10-20 drones when she was about one week old. She stores the sperm in a special gland called the spermatheca where it survives for years, until she releases several sperm on the end of each egg as it is laid. If doesn't release the sperm onto the egg, which can do at will, it hatches into a drone or male bee.