Influence of nutrition on honeybee queen egg-laying

The honeybee queen is the engine of the colony, laying thousands of eggs that develop into larvae, nurse bees, and foragers. In turn, pollen and nectar from the environment, matured into bee bread and honey in the hive, transformed by digestion to royal jelly by the worker community, fuel queen egg-laying. The queen relies on this food supply chain to produce large numbers of eggs during the high season when pollen and nectar are in abundance. Despite the importance of egg-laying for the productivity of a colony, few studies have evaluated the influence of nutrition on the quantity and quality of eggs. This review aims to describe food processing from the queen’s mouth to egg provisioning, by exploring the nutritional cues that trigger queen egg-laying, the subsequent pathways involved, and the factors that influence them.