Insect Queen

Ruler of all the bees in the entire galaxy.

"Bees got no business getting that big."

— Woodie, Don't Starve

Many insect species in the orders Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps) and Isoptera (termites) exhibit a behavior known as Eusociality, a behavioral structure which involves a singular "queen" whose only or primary purpose is to lay eggs. The other members of the queen's colony have the purpose of mating with her, tending to her, or protecting her. (Think of the colony as one big "superorganism," rather than a group of individual ants/bees/etc. The queen and the males that mate with her are the "genitals" of that "superorganism.")

In fiction, however, such individuals tend to be depicted as not only being baby factories responsible for birthing the entire colony, but also as matriarchs who rule over it to varying degrees. The "queen" in question may be bigger and much stronger or dangerous than the rest of her kin, and tends to be portrayed as being capable of commanding swarms of drones as her own personal minions and/or bodyguards in a similar manner to Hive Queens. This is Truth in Television to some extent (queens are bigger and can and do fight in at least some species, and also communicate with and "command" their children through pheromonal influences), but fiction tends to exaggerate it considerably.

In works that feature a Hive Caste System or cartoonish depictions of eusocial insects, writers like to portray the queens (and occassionally king insects) as literal monarchs, complete with crown, royal attire, and a court of loyal subjects. Even if the colony is less like a human-like monarchy and more of a Horde of Alien Locusts, expect the queen to at least possess traits resembling regalia that indicate her authority, such as a biological "crown". If evil, expect the queen to act akin to an Evil Matriarch, with no qualms about siccing her Weaponized Offspring on her enemies since she can always make more.

A common fixture of the Hive Caste System. Subtrope of Monster Lord. Frequently overlaps, but is not to be confused, with Hive Queen (which is the controlling core in a unified network mind).

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• El-Hazard: The Magnificent World: Queen Diva is the ruler of the Bugrom Empire. As such, part of her duty is to ensure there are a sufficient number of troops for their army and to sustain the Bugrom Citadel, which requires that she mate with someone. So, when Jinnai notes the shortage of troops and suggests she lays more eggs, she takes him up on the offer. But while all the other Bugrom look like huge bipedal bugs, Diva barely even qualifies as a Cute Monster Girl, completely averting the Large and in Charge aspects of the trope and looking exactly like a normal (if absurdly hot) human girl with a few cosplay accessories◊.
• Hunter × Hunter: The Chimera Ant Queen. While the other Chimera Ants are generally humanoid (albeit usually with insectoid features) she's totally insect like apart from her body proportions and unable to speak, so she communicates telepathically with her children. She also lacks any fighting ability and has to rely on them for protection. She eventually suffers Death by Childbirth giving birth to The King, Meruem, who was born with the best traits of everything she had ever consumed.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: The "Mini Superman Adventure" story arc from Season 5 sees the Supermen, Doctor H., Big M., and Little M. shrunken down to the size of ants and becoming involved with an incident with an ant colony, whose queen wears royal garments and a leaf crown and is carried around on a leaf by her servants.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: A literal queen bee with a throne and royal clothing appears in Great War in the Bizarre World, where she rules over the bees in the Bizarre World and sentences the goats to punishment after Paddi touches their sacred egg by accident.

Comic Books

• The Brood Saga: The Brood are a wasp-like alien race that are blatant expies of the xenomorphs. While most often foes of the X-Men, they have made appearance in several other titles as well. A Brood Queen lays an egg inside the body of a sentient organism; however instead of hatching out of its host, the egg converts the host's body into a Brood, with the Brood embryo's mind taking over completely. This is especially dangerous when mutants or other superpowered individuals are infected, since the new Brood may retain their host's powers.
• The DCU:
  • The various villainesses bearing the name "Queen Bee". A few of them have been aliens who lead invading swarms of insects.
  • Superman: In the Silver Age, Lana Lang sometimes gained insect attributes to become a heroine aptly known as "Insect Queen." In a nod to this, there was a Modern Age villain known as Insect Queen, ruler of an imperial group of insects called the All-Hive (not remarkably different from the alien incarnations of Queen Bee) who reshaped her body to be like Lana. In Supergirl 2010 story arc Death & the Family, Insect Queen takes over Lana and attempts to invade Metropolis with an army of giant insects.

Fan Works

• A.A. Pessimal: Subverted. Pessimal began with the canonical situation of the Republican Bees, a species who are threatened because they had a revolution and threw out the monarchy as an outmoded symbol of repression which was typical of the violence inherent in the system. The City Zoo, reponsible for the last known hive of a seriously extinction-threatened bee, thinks creatively about the situation. Witches are good with bees. And one Witch working in the city is not only a Rodinian. She also has the right mindset to communicate with the bees. A session of Borrowing later, she has suggested to them that there should be a General Secretary for the Hive who will also double as Comrade Commissar for Egg-Laying and Larval Management. The Drones should be reformed as a Glorious Red-and-Black Army for hive defense. And...
  "I did it." she said later, to an anxious Davinia Bellamy. "I got them to build zocializzm. I led a revolution. There is now a zoviet zociaalizzt beehive. Reg Zhoe, you zhould zee thizzz! In your fazzze, Olga Romanoff!"
• A Diplomatic Visit: In chapter 16, Twilight and her friends learn that there are multiple changeling queens, some of whom make their debut in chapter 25; one is a recent promotion to the position, and Twilight volunteers to help another changeling by giving him the magic and love needed to fuel their metamorphosis into a full Queen. Or king, as it may be — it's Thorax from canon, making his debut in-story.
• The Seal of Wax and Glass: The Api, a species of insectoid ponies who lived in hive-like societies and who are revealed at the end to be the ancestors of the changelings, were ruled by an immense, immobile queen who spent her whole life clinging to the ceiling of her throne room, held in place by massive golden clamps.
  There is no throne here. No seat. The queen is not like her subjects... she is far too large to move. She hangs upside down from the ceiling, with the vast bulk of her abdomen gilded in ornate metal plates, and clamped in place with a series of golden chains. She is a permanent fixture here. Never leaving the hive. Never moving an inch.

Films — Animated

• The Ant Bully has the Queen, who is huge and has a very different design from the regular ants. Although she's barely seen, she seems to be venerated and almost worshipped by the rest of the colony.
• Antz has the Queen who is both royalty and the literal mother of new members of the colony like real ant queens, though unlike real ant queens her second-in-command is a male General and troop leader who has as many loyalists in the army as she has.
• A Bug's Life: There is the Queen of the Ants and later her daughter Princess Atta who is given the crown at the end, and who interestingly seems to share her authority with the rest of the Council of Elders of whom she is a member, making her title institutional to a certain extent.

Film — Live-Action

• Alien: The xenomorphs have a queen as the center of their hive. Though normally stationary, she is the biggest, strongest, and smartest member of her species.

Literature

• Chrysalis (RinoZ): The ant queen is more evolved and intelligent than her children (at least at first), and they are very devoted to her, but she doesn't generally govern them directly, preferring to allow them their independence. As the mother of their whole species, though, she has a special place of honour in their hearts.
• Ender's Game: The Hive Queen is both this and, well, a Hive Queen. She is both the telepathic center of her species' Hive Mind and its sole breeding female.
• The Riftwar Cycle: The Cho-ja are insectoid beings larger than a human, allied with the Tsurani Empire. The Empire trilogy reveals that they are born in individual hives, ruled by queens.
• Viagens Interplanetarias: The novel Rogue Queen provides a bit of subversion, as Iroedh is initially a worker, and when she sides up with her Terranian friends, she eats their food, and the meat turns her into a full-fledged queen. Which comes very handy in the showdown. (By the way, her race is humanoid, and the insect stuff is purely social.)

Live-Action TV

• The Outer Limits (1963): In "ZZZZZ", when an entomologist gives a hive human intelligence, the queen bee takes human form so she can mate with a human male, thus creating a race of Half-Human Hybrids who will Take Over the World. She can control her fellow bees and make them attack people, such as the wife of the man she wants to seduce.

Other Sites

• SCP Foundation: SCP-1702 ("The French Hive") is a hive of bee people under France, with a hive caste system. The Queen of SCP-1702 (SCP-1702-1) is highly intelligent, lays eggs that become the other members of the hive, and is killed by the sterile females (SCP-1702-3) if she becomes flawed in any way. Any female human being who happens to be inside SCP-1702 when this happens becomes the new Queen.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons Module WG7 Castle Greyhawk, level 7 "Queen of the Honeybee Hive". The Big Bad of the level is Aunt Bee. She was originally a human being, but was turned into a giant queen bee by her addiction to royal jelly. She rules over all of the bee (and bee-like) monsters in the level.
• Magic: The Gathering: Insect queens show up in a couple of cards, typically with abilities that let them create smaller, weaker insects to fight alongside them.
  • Ant Queen is a moderately large Insect card whose only ability lets her place a weak insect onto the battlefield.
    "Kill the queen first, or we'll be fighting her drones forever. It is not in a queen's nature to have enough servants."

    —Borzard, exterminator captain
  • Hornet Queen automatically creates a group of smaller, flying insects when brought into battle.
• The Unofficial Hollow Knight RPG: The leader of the Vespine Authority holds the title of High Queen while individual cities and provinces are ruled by Low Queens, who are also called Overseers. The society of the ants has mostly collapsed following the Sandwyrm's conquest of their lands, but they seem to have had a similar system. The bees were a subversion, as while they did have "Queens," the Apidaen Union was actually a democracy where the Queens only acted as temporary leaders in times of crisis.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has a card named "Insect Queen". If she destroys an enemy monster, she generates a weak Insect-type token monster on your side of the field. However, she has to eat her subjects before she can attack. Her sacrifice is more than likely one of the aforementioned offspring.

Video Games

• Amorphous+: You can encounter and fight one near the end of a nest. The idea of the Insect Queen is actually played with in-game. The descriptions for the Queen admit that it is not certain whether she really does control the hive, or whether the Gloople swarm has no true ruler and the Insect Queen is just another member of it, albeit a very powerful one. There is a step above the normal Insect Queen, too...

• Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M.: The Queen(s). Each stage usually contains a large one that apparently all the other bug-aliens respond to. The final level plays this one most seriously, with the whole series of levels being a giant insect hive in space.
• Banjo-Tooie features Honey B., who lives in a beehive in the Plateau area of Isle O' Hags. She can increase the Life Meter of the starring duo in exchange for the Empty Honeycombs scattered in the game's worlds.
• Bayonetta: The demonesses that make contracts with the Umbra Witches invoke this trope. Bayonetta is contracted to Madama Butterfly, a massive butterfly woman, while Jeanne is contracted to Madama Styx, a massive moth woman who is even described as being the Queen of the River Styx. In Bayonetta 2 Rosa has her own demoness she is bound too, a massive scarab woman named Madama Khepri who is said to be a Goddess in Inferno with dominion over time and the sun.
• Bug Fables, a game that revolves around insects, naturally has these for each kingdom of social bugs.
  • The Ant Kingdom has Queen Elizant I, who was a kind and gentle queen who sought to find the Everlasting Sapling to ensure her benevolent rule would last for generations, only to fail and pass the task to her daughter, Queen Elizant II, who struggles with keeping up the legacy of her mother.
  • The Bee Kingdom has Queen Bianca, another queen known to be a kind and gentle ruler, whose focus on scientific advances greatly improved the kingdom, making her one of the most popular rulers. She is also the close friend to Queen Elizant II, and the latter occasionally asks her for advice in times of need. Her relationship with the playable character Violet, a worker bee, is slightly more casual, because they're mother and daughter.
  • The Termites have not only a queen, but a king as well.^note Termites have kings in real life. They are ruled by Queen Layra II and King Hector IV. While the relationship between ants and termites is rocky, they had peaceful relationship during the rule of Queen Elizant I, but the alliance fell apart after Queen Elizant II came to rule. King Hector IV is known to be very short-tempered and being a grudge-holder, with Queen Layra II serving as a voice of reason.
  • Double Subverted with the Wasp Kingdom, as they are ruled by the Wasp King instead of a queen. However, the Wasp King is actually The Usurper who used the ancient crown to brainwash wasps into his servitude, and he's not even a wasp but a wasp mimic fly. Their true ruler is peaceful Queen Vanessa II, who, after the Wasp King's defeat, reclaims her throne and works to undo the damage done by his tyrannical rule.
• Chameleon Twist: The boss of Ant Land is a Queen Ant that dresses in Victorian-era fashion. She attacks by laying ants from her giant abdomen that the player has to eat and spit out at her. Makes As Much Sense In Context.
• Colobot: An alien insect queen is the game's Final Boss. She regularly lays eggs from which insect units spawn, and she's resistant to any attacks that don't come from the specialized super gun you uncover in the last level.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day has both a Queen Bee and a King Bee, but as of the game's events they split up due to marital differences; the Queen cries in despair when her honeycomb is stolen by the wasps in the Windy chapter, while the King spends all the time lusting for a busty sunflower in the Barn Boys chapter. Conker helps the Queen retrieve the honeycomb twice (in both cases, only because of the money he'll receive as reward) and also helps the King hook up with the sunflower; but the two regal characters never reconcile, and the Queen dies when the windmill explodes accidentally due to Rodent's impact and the resulting debris smashes her and the honeycomb.
• Cuphead: Rumor Honeybottoms is a huge queen bee that fights you inside a honeycomb/office building hybrid that is constantly filling with honey. In her first phase she sends a bee policeman after you, but afterwards she'll show she's very adept at magic spells.
• Darkstalkers: Q-Bee is the queen of the Soul Bees, monsters that imitate the appearance of humans then prey on their souls.
• Donkey Kong Country: Queen B., queen of the wasp-like Zingers. The sequel introduced her apparent mate, King Zing, boss of an area full of Hornet Holes.
• Earthworm Jim: Evil Queen Pulsating Bloated Festering Sweaty Pus-Filled Malformed Slug-for-a-Butt (Or Queen Slug-for-a-Butt for short), a queen termite with a very squicky self-explanatory name. Her absolute control and her subjects blind, dogmatic worship of her are exactly how one would expect intelligent termites that follow their earthly animal counterparts pattern to behave.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • The original version of the game introduces the Ant Queen, fought as a Mini-Boss in Azure Rainforest (this also applies to the remake Millenium Girl), and in later games as an Optional Boss in the sea (The Drowned City) and in a Mini-Dungeon (Nexus). If the egg sacs she drops aren't gotten rid of prior to the battle, the newborn Ants will eventually join the battle, making things more difficult.
  • In Millenium Girl, the Queen Bee serves as the second boss of the remake-exclusive Gladsheim. She's not aggresive by nature, but since she's nesting in the power source (which your party needs to activate), fighting her will be an unfortunate necessity.
• Fallout: Despite being crustaceans, the enormous mirelurk queens fit most points of this trope. They appear to be where most horseshoe crab-type 'lurks come from, even being able to quickly eject barrages of hatchlings as a weapon and distraction, and are easily the largest and toughest members of the mirelurk species complex.
• Granblue Fantasy: The primary raid boss battle for the "Little Skyfarer: A la Sacre Blumiel" event is Queen Bee, a humanoid woman with the lower body of a bee.
• Kirby: Triple Deluxe: Queen Sectonia is a giant wasp who wears classical royal attire and leads the Sectras in an invasion of the sky kingdom of Floralia. It's strongly implied in subsequent games that she wasn't always a wasp and used to look like Taranza, not to mention that she was actually a good ruler until she became corrupted by the Dimension Mirror.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Gohmas are generally portrayed this way (mostly as an Arachnid Queen, but fits nonetheless). They appear as bosses of the dungeon in which their offspring appear as enemies, and they often release their offspring as a Flunky Boss. Twilight Princess also has Twilit Bloat, the fly-like queen of the Shadow Insects.
• Monster Hunter has both the Vespoid Queen (a King Mook version of the Vespoids) from Freedom Unite and the Seltas Queen as well as her Desert subspecies from Monster Hunter 4 and its Ultimate expansion respectively. The Vespoid Queen is aided by the smaller Vespoids during battle, but otherwise she's not too difficult to defeat; but the two Seltas Queens are more powerful as, with their male Seltas partners, they make up for more lethal duos when confronting the hunter.
• Mortal Kombat X: D'Vorah, who can command all manner of creepies (like slugs and bees). She herself is part insect, as her compound eyes can attest to, and she keeps her bugs inside her stomach cavity.
• Nefarious: Princess Apoidea fits the bill, despite only being, well, a princess. It's implied in the sequel webcomics that this world doesn't even have the concept of a queen (or a king for that matter), because Princesses Rule, which means that's really as high as it gets.
• Phantasy Star Online 2: The Falspawn consist of a number of subgroups, each led by a corresponding Dark Falz. Dark Falz Apprentice, a vain, beauty-obsessed Vamp, commands the insectoid Falspawn. Her Apprezina form leans into this with a combat style that revolves around summoning drones to fight for it. The Dark Blast version makes it even more explicit by giving the related skills royalty-themed names.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin 2: The Empress Bulblax is based on queen termites. She is a large, bloated Bulborb that attacks by rolling about and releasing Bulborb Larvae to devour your Pikmin.
  • Pikmin 3: The Scornet Maestro is a large bee-like creature fought as the game's fourth boss. She's the leader of a large swarm of scornets, bee-like enemies that live along the Twilight River. In battle, she uses signals created by strumming her harp-like beak to direct her swarm into various attack formations.
  • Hey! Pikmin: The Queen Shearwig, the fifth boss of the game, is a giant version of the series' common shearwig enemies, which resemble legless, winged, grub-like insects with large jaws. In battle, she attacks primarily by commanding a large swarm of shearwigs in a midair battle against Olimar and his Winged Pikmin troop.
• Pokémon: Vespiquen. She only evolves from female Combee, and has signature moves that involve ordering other Combee to attack, defend, or heal her.
• Scourge: Outbreak: The titular Scourge, giant insect mutants from outer space, follows a caste system with a queen on top.
• Super Mario Galaxy: Queen Bee or the Honey Queen is the queen of all bees in the universe, and dresses in appropriate regalia. She's also playable in Mario Kart 7, where she is decidedly smaller.
• Sword of the Stars: The Hivers have a Hive Caste System with similarities to feudalism, with one Queen and several Princesses. The Princesses birth clans of workers, warriors, and Princes who fill command roles and are exchanged between clans for alliances, while the Queen is the only one who can make new Princesses. When she dies, her daughters fight amongst themselves for the right to eat her ovaries and become the next Queen.
• Temtem has Waspeen, an all-female species that resembles a giant, flightless bee. One of its traits is called Royal Jelly (which heals itself and its ally at the end of each turn), and its Secret Art Swarm Aid involves sending a swarm of Chubee (its pre-evolution) to drain the opponents' health.
• Terraria: The Queen Bee. A giant bee boss that shoots out smaller bees which attack you until you kill them.
• Warcraft III: The Nerubians play with this trope, being weird combination of arachnids and insects. The nerubians are mostly spider-themed, but with a social structure more or less based on social insects, with their most powerful units called Queens. In the campaign, they are often found alongside massive clutches of spiderling eggs (although one unit splits into two lesser Nerubians on death, justified as it carrying its young into battle). The social aspect is further removed when the expansion shows that they also have kings, who are a mishmash of beetle and praying mantis that apparently carry locusts in their carapaces.

Webcomics

• Girl Genius: The giant mostly sessile Hive Queens look more reptilian than buglike, but their warrior and slaver wasp offspring are far more insectoid.
• Paranormal Mystery Squad: The fanatical cryptid hunter Stefanie Kane is kidnapped by the moth men in the final arc. By the time her younger sister Katie finds her she's been transformed into their new queen and is enthusiastically "giving her all" to repopulate the species.

Western Animation

• The Color Classics cartoon "Ants in the Plants" from 1940 has a queen ant with cape and crown, first seen teaching her soldier ants to beware of the anteater, and later acts as a Damsel in Distress for the diminutive Big Damn Heroes to rescue.
• Beast Wars doesn't involve any real insect queens, but it does reference this trope for comedic purposes: Inferno, who transforms into a massive ant, frequently refers to Megatron as his "queen," much to the latter's chagrin. Towards the end of the series, Inferno more often uses the term "royalty" instead, possibly to avoid drawing Megatron's ire.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Queenie is a cartoon queen bee of a happy hive in the episode "Risky Beesness". Her subjects are drawn away by the hypnotic music of Irwina Allen, an entomologist who would turn the worker bees into her personal mindless minions. Queenie rules her hive by consensus, fulfilling this trope, while Irwina is a usurper befitting the Hive Queen trope.
• Futurama: The Slurm Worms from Wormulon are slug-like creatures that can replicate themselves when cut in half and they work on the very popular soft drink Slurm. They also have a much larger Queen Slurm, but she is not shown producing offspring. She is, however, the one that produces all the Slurm by ejecting it from her backside. It seems that new queens can be produced by submerging someone in Royal Slurm, but according to one of the workers, a queen formed by a lower caste produces foul-tasting Slurm.
• The Magic School Bus: In one episode the class gets shrunk down and enters an ant hill so Keesha can make a movie about them. She's fixated on having the queen as her star, seeming to think of queens as we know them, and is disappointed when she turns out to be just a giant ant who lays eggs.
• Men in Black: The Series: A villainous example is the evil Bug Queen. We see several queens in the show, and all of them are monsters. They colonize other worlds just by breeding thousands of bugs and extinguish the natives.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Queen Chrysalis has similarities to this, being the Queen of the Changelings, an insectoid/equinoid species who imitate other ponies and feed on their love. Her goal is to conquer Equestria and use the land and its inhabitants as a virtually infinite food source for her subjects. As she's later ousted from power by her subjects (who are sick of her taking all their food for herself) and King Thorax takes over, it's possible that while she fancied herself as this, they are born from parents the way ponies are.
  • In "A Health of Information", the flash bee hive seems to be ruled by a queen that is visibly larger than the male workers. While the queen is not seen commanding or ordering the other bees about, she is shown wearing a crown, as well as standing on a raised, throne-like dais in the center of the hive.

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