For example can a Queen Bee or Termite be born to a bee or termite? Or do the parents have to be Queen and King? Or can only Queens lay eggs??
In: Biology
Termites and some ant subspecies: they can and will undergo a metamorphosis and become a queen. This is usually done to establish a satellite colony.
If you’ve ever seen a “flying ant” this is not some separate subspecies of ant; this is just a number (nearly 1% of that colony’s population) of your garden variety ants of that colony who meta-morph in to reproductive (with wings) in order to establish a satellite colony (though if a queen dies, to replace her.)
Some any subspecies do this by “budding” which is a whole different process.
I don’t know about termites, but with bees, only the Queen lays eggs. If the swarm outgrows the nest, they will separate a female egg, and feed it a very specific type of honey called Royal Jelly, and not fed pollen or regular honey. That will eventually become a queen and lead half of the swarm to find a new nesting site.
Only the queens can lay eggs, but they lay two different kinds of eggs:
Eggs that are not fertilized become male Drone bees.
Eggs that are fertilized (with sperm that the queen received from Drones before she started her colony and uses her entire life) become female bees. There are two different kinds of female bees:
Ordinary females become worker bees.
Females that are raised in specially made larger cells and are fed Royal Jelly become Queens.
There’s only one Queen in a hive so when new Queens are made the old Queen leaves (with about half the hive) and starts a new hive. The new Queens in the old hive fight to the death until only one survives.
When a Queen gets old or if she dies unexpectedly then the worker bees can expand the cells of some existing larva and feed them Royal Jelly and make them into “emergency” Queens.
With ants, only the Queens and males (drones) are fertile. The vast majority of ants – workers, soldiers, etc – are infertile females and cannot become fertile later in life.
Young Queens and Drones have wings and leave the nest in a ‘nuptial flight’ where they fly out en-mass, find a suitable mate, hopefully from a different colony, and bang it out. The Drones (males) then die, and the New Queen finds a suitable spot to dig a hole and start a new colony.
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