You're forgetting the part where the queen is never alone, being prodded along by workers to continue laying eggs at an acceptable pace. When the hive (not the

You're forgetting the part where the queen is never alone, being prodded along by workers to continue laying eggs at an acceptable pace. When the hive (not the queen!) decides it's time to swarm, they'll force the queen to move more briskly in the hope she loses some weight and the second flight of her life can go more than a few meters. If the queen isn't up to the task the workers will go to some existing brood comb and give the larvae some "royal" jelly to get a replacement. As soon as one spawns the other infantile queens are slaughtered. The entire reason we get the language of queen/worker/drone is because Europeans saw a complex ordered system and projected their own hierarchy on it. A "queen" bee never issues commands. She's only good for laying more larvae and even if she were to die suddenly the only issue is finding some immature larvae already in the hive to feed "royal" jelly. They don't decide when or where to swarm, and are basically carried by the mass of bees "escorting" them to their new home. Yes, the queen is the reproductive source of the hive and losing a queen can really mess everything up depending on the timing. To say that all the other bees are simply "arms of the queen" is incredibly reductive though. She can be replaced at any time, and often is as she ages. The "productivity" curve rapidly decreases after the first or second year of life. It's not uncommon for commercial beekeepers to replace a queen every 2 years, and the worker bees aren't much more forgiving when it comes to her performance. Small aside, it's only in summer that workers live ~7 weeks. They live 150-200 days in the winter. The labor they provide is incredibly metabolically taxing, in comparison with eating and giving birth all day every day.