Worker bees have power to pick their queen
A recent study reveals that worker bees play a crucial role in selecting future queen bees in bumblebee colonies. This selection process is influenced by the juvenile hormone, which the workers pass to larvae through feeding. The findings suggest a more decentralized colony structure, challenging previous notions of a strict hierarchy.
- ▪Worker bees can influence which larvae become queens by feeding them juvenile hormone.
- ▪The study shows that the more juvenile hormone larvae receive, the more likely they are to develop into queens.
- ▪This research shifts the understanding of bee colony dynamics from a top-down hierarchy to a more collaborative system.
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| Original publisher | Popular Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.popsci.com/environment/worker-bees-pick-queen/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 10:45:02 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T14:49:57.678Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T14:49:57.678Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wTiMXEfAClAR · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Worker bees can alter the future of the colony’s larvae. Image: Shutterstock Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Email address Sign up Thank you! Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. While every bumble bee colony has a queen, the process for becoming that queen bee may be a bit more democratic than monarchical. The worker bees appear to select which baby will be queen one day, according to a new study published in the journal Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The key to this selection process lies in the juvenile hormone. This hormone in insects is responsible for their development, molting, and eventual reproduction.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Popular Science.
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