Are there queens among wild bees ?

Printer-friendly version
The presence of a queen is a characteristic of social insects (ants, termites, honey bees, bumblebees).  Since wild bees are almost all solitary, there is no queen.
Yet, there are different levels of sociability for different bees.  Solitary bees keep to themselves, gregarious species prefer to lay eggs in close proximity to each other, creating nesting aggregations.
Whereas, social species are either (i)  sub-social colonies, where one dominant female lays eggs, and the others collect pollen and keep guard or (ii)  eusocial species, where casts are created and the queen is morphologically different from the workers (who have atrophied genitals).