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Glite Dictionary
🃏 No queens in cards ♟️ No queen in chess 🐝 No queen insect
queenless

queenless

6.4
A colony of insects like bees or ants with no queen
  • adjective
  • /ˈkwinləs/
  • Specialized
: sin reina
  • A queenless hive often faces challenges in reproducing, leading to a decline in its population.

Examples

  • In their queenless state, the ants became disorganized and had difficulty foraging for food.

  • Because queenless colonies are particularly susceptible to usurpation, the team maintains a group of queenless colonies to lure usurpation swarms into their apiary to be studied.

    Academic text (2004)

  • The researchers observed that the queenless bee colony struggled to thrive without a leader.

Surface Forms

queenless positive

Morphology

queenless = queen (transparent) = queen + less

Productive '-less' suffix applied to 'queen' yields 'without a queen', directly matching the biological colony sense.

Etymology

Queenless comes from queen and the suffix -less meaning 'without'. A queenless hive or ant colony has 'no queen' to lay eggs, so the colony may struggle or needs a new queen.