Ohne perfektes Mikroklima keine perfekte Königin - neue Erkenntnisse zur Weiselzelle!

Royal jelly alone apparently doesn't make a perfect queen bee. A new Nature study shows that the future queen also needs a special "nursery"—a peanut-shaped queen cell made of special wax, built by young worker bees with elevated body temperatures. This video discusses queen cells, special wax, microclimate, humidity, warmth, bee physiology, and what beekeepers and queen breeders can learn from this. An earlier iScience paper by Kubásek et al. also shows that bees can build wax caps with varying degrees of gas permeability depending on their function. Brood caps allow gas exchange, while honey caps are almost gas-tight. Wax is therefore not a passive building material in the bee colony, but a functional material. Sources: Fang et al. (2026): Queen cell architecture shapes honey bee queen development. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10534-3 Kubásek et al. (2022): Honeybees control the gas permeability of brood and honey cappings. iScience 25(11), 105445. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105445 University of California, Riverside News (2026): How honeybees really crown their queens. Reuters Science (2026): Worker bees build a “royal palace” for the honeybee queen. C&EN (2026): Queen bees get special wax. #Bees #Beekeeping #QueenBee #QueenBreeding #Honeybees #Microclimate #RoyalJelly ____________________ Video production: Dominique Damay Script: Thorsten Schwerte Voiceover: Thorsten Schwerte