Imagine if you could determine the fate of your infant daughter's future as worker caste or queen, simply by changing what you feed them as a baby.
Queen bee breeder Michael Kiem has built a successful business by capitalising on the fact that diet is transformative for female honey bees and express posting his little livestock across Australia's eastern seaboard.
"They'll feed her a different diet, but they start off exactly the same as a worker," Mr Kiem said.
"Not a lot of people know about it."
Mr Kiem will deliver up to 50,000 queen bees through the post this year to strengthen hives for crucial crop pollination and honey production.
Each queens sells for between $26 to $38, depending on the size of the order.
To create queen bees, Mr Kiem and his 15-year-old son Hayden carefully graft three to four-day-old female larvae into rows of plastic cells.
The cells are then placed inside the hive's top super box — a box used to collect honey — which is screened off to exclude the queen in the box below.
The absence of a queen in the top box convinces nurse bees to turn the larvae in the plastic cells into queens, by feeding them an exclusive diet of a nutritious milky secretion called royal jelly.
Demand for Queensland-bred queen bees has boomed since an outbreak of the world's worst bee parasite, varroa mite, severely restricted hive movements in New South Wales.
"[It] made it hard for commercial apiarists to get the numbers of queens they need and next season [will be difficult] if they haven't been able to re-queen their hives," Mr Kiem said.
"A lot of agriculture relies on bees; I don't think people realise how much."
Bees by express post
At Cloyna in the South Burnett, the Kiem family has never been busier.
Each day they work to keep up with mail orders, which are express posted for next-day delivery.
"We do 1,500 a week from September to the end of April, shut down for a few months and start up again in August," Mr Kiem said.
"We don't take more orders than we can produce."
The 43-year-old began beekeeping at the age of 17, learning from Denmar Apiary's previous owners Denis and Margaret Kidd, who he bought the business from.
The family breeds Italian honey bees.
"[It] works well for our climate — they're nice, quiet, hard-working bees that keep the hive tidy and hygienic," Mr Kiem's son Hayden said.
"I love bees and helping dad, I can't wait to finish school and do as much work with the bees … as I can."
Before the packing process, young queens are mated with drones — male bees.
They are then placed in plastic cages, with worker bees to tend to them.
"We put six escorts in with the queen and they've got a tube of candy to keep them fed on the way when they're in the mail," Mr Kiem said.
"The younger the queen, the more vigorous — and she lays a lot better.
"A lot of [apiarists] re-queen every year to keep their hives at maximum performance."
Recognised by their large abdomen, queen bees hold the highest-ranking position in honey bee colonies, laying up to 1,500 eggs a day in spring and summer.
Female bees do all the work in the hive, including feeding the male drones, who hatch from unfertilised eggs and whose sole role is reproduction.
But Mr Kiem said a drone's life was not always enviable.
"Once it gets cold the workers will actually throw the drones out if there's not enough food — it is pretty brutal," Mr Kiem said.
