Are not Queen Bees blind with no wings? How could they travel?

Question

Are not Queen Bees blind with no wings? How could they travel?

Answer 1

No, they are NOT blind, and they certainly have very functional wings.  

It is rather difficult to tell the queen from all her female workers because she is only just slightly larger than they are.  With one mating only, she is capable of laying eggs every day for the rest of her life, and these equal thousands and thousand of offspring.    There are only three types of bees within the colony:  the queen, the drone (male), and the workers.  The male's ONLY function is to mate high in the air with the young virgin queen on their "wedding" flight, then he dies.

It is fascinating how the queen is created:  When the "workers" feel it is time for a new queen, they pick several wax chambers and enlarge each one by chewing out the wax in the neighboring walls around a freshly laid egg.  When the egg hatches, instead of feeding the new larvae honey like all the others, they feed it "Royal Jelly", which is a highly concentrated version of honey with different properties.  As the larvae grows it gets bigger than the other larvae because the chamber is larger.  The workers then seal off the chamber, and after metamorphosis, a new queen emerges.

Since they've made several of these large chambers, several new queen-to-bees emerge.  This is done to "ensure" the survival of the strongest and best.  The new virgins fight it out to the death.  The remaining queen finds any unhatched large chambers and stings to death the larvae within.   She is then the new, undisputed queen of the hive, IF the old queen is too old.  If not, and after her wedding flight, she gathers up many workers, and swarms away with them to start a new bee hive elsewhere.

Honeybees are wonderful creatures.  Can you imagine where we'd be without them.  Many of the flowers and plants on this planet would die from lack of pollination.  And, we'd have no honey to add to candy, to put on cereal, to add a "spark" to our taste buds.

Answer 2

There are different stages of being a queen bee.  There are also other queen bees in the colony, her sisters, they are on reserve in case something happens to the dominate queen.  A new colony is started when one of those sisters flies off with a few of her colony mates.