The Xenomorph Queens of the Alien mythos act as the dark hearts of their particular hordes, coordinating their deadly efforts and ensuring there are always more facehugger eggs waiting to wipe out a planet's biological life. But a deeper look into Alien lore shows that the Xenomorph Queen has a whole other purpose as well. The Queen Alien doesn’t just produce eggs, but also an incredibly powerful drug known as Royal Jelly.
The Xenomorph Queen made her first appearance in the film Aliens, directed by James Cameron, where fans saw the facehugger eggs that were used to take over the human settlement of Hadley’s Hope on LV-426. In the film, the Xenomorphs are still fairly unknown lifeforms, with experimentation being conducted in the settlement by Weyland-Yutani scientists. The company’s conclusions on the Xenomorphs’ lives and reproductive system focus on how they are the perfect weapon/organism. However, as the comics explore the alien species further, more information is learned about the deadly creatures, including the discovery that the Queen can create the drug Royal Jelly.
The chief function of Royal Jelly is explored in the comic series Aliens: Genocide written by Mike Richardson and John Arcudi with art by Damon Willis and Arthur Suydam. In that Alien storyline from the Dark Horse comics canon, an organization is experimenting on Xenomorphs to derive Royal Jelly from them in order to refine and sell the drug, which can be used for a number of purposes. The first issue of the series outlines some of the drug’s properties, giving the user incredible strength, speed, and endurance - effectively giving them the abilities of a Xenomorph. The implication seems to be that the Queen is capable of amping-up Xenomorphs' natural abilities, and of passing this benefit on to other species (after all, the creatures' reproductive cycle is already endlessly adaptive to whatever biological life is available.)
While Aliens: Genocide explores the effects of Royal Jelly, it isn’t the only book to do so. In the Alien series Aliens: Music of the Spears, Royal Jelly is a much more accessible drug that some people use to achieve an enlightened experience, with this comic showing that the drug has more of a hallucinogenic quality rather than that of an incredibly strong amphetamine. In that series, Royal Jelly is refined by a pharmaceutical company that sells the drugs to religious organizations to use as part of their ceremonies.
Whether it be used for enhanced combat or to reach a state of enlightenment, Royal Jelly is a versatile drug that is derived from an even more versatile alien species. The raw form of the Jelly is the goo substance that fans first saw in the film Aliens that drips from the Queen’s birthing pod after an egg is delivered. That substance is taken and refined until Royal Jelly is produced and ready for distribution. Alien's most consistent theme is that Weyland-Yutani will never stop trying to find ways to take advantage of the Xenomorph threat, and in the Royal Jelly of the Queen, the evil corporation found yet another way to profit from keeping this deadly species around.