What function does royal jelly have in the colony? Why is it produced?

The basic answer to these

questions is that royal jelly is all about queen production, an issue so vital to the propagation of the bee
species that, in fact, all bees other than the drones (who don’t have a father) are destined to become
queens. At first! One of the questions often asked by new beekeepers is: how is a queen formed? The
nature of honey-bees turns this question on its head, and beekeepers should ask ‘how is a worker bee
formed?’ because it is worth repeating that all female larvae are destined to be queens. Nurse bees
interfere with the vast majority of these potential queens by limiting their royal jelly diet, thereby
turning them into sterile female workers instead. It is simply this lack of royal jelly at a certain stage in
their development that creates workers. Queens stay as queens because the continued feeding of royal
jelly stimulates the correct hormone production to develop egg-producing organs. Recent research in
Brazil has looked at when and how these organs develop for queens but don’t for workers. This research
found that all female larvae start off with the same reproductive equipment (and are otherwise
genetically the same as well). The pertinent parts are the egg-producing ovarioles – long, skinny
subdivisions of the ovaries. To begin with, larval workers and queens have the same number of
ovarioles. For the first 2½ to 3 days, this situation persists. While worker and queen larvae mature in
different cells, this makes little difference to their development – the important thing is that both
receive 100% royal jelly. So they stay the same and are on their way to queenhood. On about day 3, the
nurses stop giving larval workers 100% royal jelly food and give them instead a mixture of jelly, pollen
and honey. The workers thus receive much less 38 | A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF BEEKEEPING jelly than
the queens, and, over the next few days, the number of worker ovarioles therefore dwindles. On day 5,
the workers and queens differ vastly in ovarioles count. It is then that both the worker and queen larvae
spin cocoons and pupate (they undergo several changes to emerge as adult bees). The workers continue
to reabsorb their ovarioles into their bodies through pupation. As emerging adults, workers have only
about 10 ovarioles, whereas queens have over 100. With so few egg-producing ovarioles left, the larval
workers largely lose the ability to reproduce