Date: 2013-01-26 02:36 am (UTC)
Usually she's just got a black back, though the darker orange colour as pictured is pretty typical. There's a few burgundy backed queens among the hives now, I'm not sure what's up with that. But as you can see, sometimes the workers themselves will randomly have a different skin color!

They actually were, very specifically, waiting for someone with the right smell. Or at least, didn't recognize her smell. Workers attack a queen with a smell that's not familiar to them. Which is why when we introduce queens into a hive we do so in a little mesh cage, with some sugar "candy" in one end that it'll take them a few days to chew through, so they're accustomed to her smell by the time they release her.

In the case of a new queen naturally hatching out in a hive though I guess some bees still try to start fights with her, which is what was going on here.

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