Where Is the Honey Bee Queen Flying? The Original Case of a Foraging Queen

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Reproduction is the only task normally attributed to the queen due to its specific morpho-functional characteristics, while foraging activities are exclusively carried out by workers bees in the honey bee colony. For example, the queen’s proboscis is shorter than that of workers and, therefore, less suitable for exploring the inside of flowers to collect nectar. Olfactory and visual detection is also less developed in the queen than in workers, and it is well known how important these stimuli are in order to search for appropriate flowers and find the food source within the flower. In the countryside of northern Sardinia, a honey bee queen (Apis mellifera L.) was detected for the first time while foraging on a flower (a borage flower), most likely during an orientation flight before mating. The open, shallow corolla, and the excellent nectar secretion of the borage flower might have facilitated the queen bee activity. This new queen behaviour was based on the morphological traits of the specimen collected and photos taken in that moment. The observed foraging activity opens new and yet unexplored perspectives on the behaviour of queen bees outside the nest (or the hive), which could occasionally include tasks usually attributed only to workers. ABSTRACT: During a bee fauna survey in the countryside of northern Sardinia, a honey bee queen (Apis mellifera L.) was detected while foraging on a borage (Borago officinalis L.) flower in Uri, Province of Sassari, Italy, most likely during an orientation flight before mating. Morphological details, detectable from photos with the naked eye and stereomicroscopic observations, confirmed that the honey bee queen was sucking nectar from a flower. The enormous development of the abdomen, lack of pollen-collecting structures in the legs and other characteristics such as the typical distally bilobed shape of the mandibles, with long hairs on their outer surface, proved the structural differences between the queen specimen and the other castes of bees. The queen’s proboscis, which is shorter compared to the workers, may have been counterbalanced by the shape and nectar production of the borage flower. This new observation proves that the queen can feed herself under natural conditions, likely to obtain the energy required for flying. Although we cannot exclude disturbing factors that could explain this foraging behaviour of a queen observed for the first time, this note opens a new scenario and discusses this new finding in the context of the available literature on the queen’s behaviour and questions to be answered.