florea_queen

The queen and her retinue of a florea colony. Note the bee with '77' on her, which I tagged the night before. Because workers form a few layers of curtains, one has to comb through them to find the queen. This one took us about 20 min to find and I just got lucky to have this clear shot, because two seconds later she disappeared again. Both florea and dorsata queens can fly without any preparation. European and Asian honey bee queens would need to be starved for 2-3 days before they can fly because they are too fat when laying eggs.