How the Queen Bee lost her crown
The emergence of historical thought that the Queen Bee is not a leader of a colony
The role of the Queen Bee has been of interest to beekeepers and those who study or think about honeybees for as long as we have understood that there is a single, unique bee in each colony that is unlike any of the others.
In this essay, we shall explore some of the ways that this knowledge has been unpicked over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whilst we might still call this bee a Queen, we now know that her role is not that of some benevolent dictator but something quite different.
