The built-in iterator for java's PriorityQueue does not traverse the data structure in any particular order. Why?

Question

This is straight from the Java Docs:

This class and its iterator implement all of the optional methods of the Collection and Iterator interfaces.

Answer 1

At first guess, it's probably traversing the data in the order in which it's stored. To minimize the time to insert an item in the queue, it doesn't normally store all the items in sorted order.