This little lady is a real queen bee. She is a member of the Apis Mellifica species and was featured in The Young Collector’s Handbook of Ants, Bees, Dragon-flies, Earwigs, Crickets, and Flies Hymenoptera, Neuro
ptera, Orthoptera, Hemiptera, Diptera, a 1890 publication written by W. Harcourt Bath.
The text describes our little friend as a “common Hive Bee” and explains that in southern Europe their bands are more brightly-colored. The queen bee releases pheromones, often referred to as queen scent to control the worker bees.
Queen bees cans lay as many as 2,500 eggs a day.
This queen bee image was drawn without color. But, I suspect it would not bee that hard to add a bit of your own coloring to her to make her really show off how lovely she is or how you imagine a bee should look.
This image is copyright free and in the public domain anywhere that extends copyrights 70 years after death or at least 120 years after publication when the original illustrator is unknown.
