I was reading commentary that in the first movie there was never any concept of a "Queen" or a collective hive mind. The original thought behind the first Alien was that it was a bio-engineered weapon from some other ancient Alien race, and the ship that Ripley and the Gang find is a crashed bomber, of sorts. The eggs are kept in a bombing bay in a sort of stasis (which is broken when the explorers break that light/fog cover as they explore). The team behind the original film was envisioning the ship owning species dropping the eggs on enemies and unleashing Xenomorph hell. Anyway, the Alien in the first movie starts cocooning it's victims to the walls of the ship, which was supposedly done to make more eggs (whether it's turning it's victims into eggs, or eating them so it can lay the eggs itself is not really discussed). But it was able to reproduce on it's own -- no Queen needed.
Which, if you think about it, makes much more sense than having a queen. There are all sorts of parasitoid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid] Wasps and bugs (animals that lay their eggs inside living hosts, whose larvae then eat the insides of the host for nutrition before molting into adulthood and bursting out of the dead host). But none of the known parasitoids are eusocial--employing a sterile worker caste that helps a central queen do all the reproducing.
/nerd rant
