Beekeeper, here. Just want to correct this: "the microbial mix that honeybees feed to their larva when they want to raise a new queen. " All larvae eat royal jelly for the first three days. All but the queens stop at that.

I come from a family of beekeepers and I had no idea that all larvae eat royal jelly early on. That's pretty neat!

There has been interesting research over the last couple years on this topic. It is in fact not royal jelly that pushes female bees down the queen development path, but rather the addition of honey and pollen that stops them from becoming queens. Feeding beebread to female larvae is what alters their gene expression to less developed ovaries, because of a specific plant chemical, where they would all normally develop into queens.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500795

Does that mean you can mass-produce queens by separating them from the hive and continuing to feed them the jelly?

Yes, people do Queen-farm by doing exactly that. Then they sell them for Re-Queening that many commercial beekeepers do to reduce the risk of queen loss after the first year (normally they live 2-4 years).

I remember reading the same Roald Dahl short story about Royal Jelly as part of a book called The Great Automatic Grammatizator. His short stories were all great reads for an early teenager.

It‘s facinating to read about bees since without them food production would plummet and famine would set in.

I read that a simple system only has so many ways to adapt and a complex system has many more and so has a better chance to survive(„nature finds its way“).

Aaand now I want to know if his hive survived. Thanks Nautilus.

Enjoyed this back in 2014 when it was written.