Bee School, Part II

The next individual to consider in a working colony is the Drone.

Before I begin, I must start with this word.  Anthropomorphism. See definition below. 

Writing about drones will be difficult to not anthropomorphize.  So forgive me.

Drones are the males in the colony.  They develop from an egg laid by the queen.  She will lay fertilized and non-fertilized eggs.  The former develop into female worker bees.  The later develop into drones.  Any genetic knowledge you might have would lead you to ponder how this can be very good, overall, to the health and future of the colony.  It is really more complicated than this, but the genetics are way over my head!

The drone's number one role is to mate with a virgin queen.  A drone does not collect nectar or pollen.  A drone does not have a stinger, is fed by others, and doesn't even groom himself (careful, careful....don't anthropomorphize.....!!).

So how is it that bees don't inbreed and get their colony genetics all messed up?

This is really crazy and you aren't going to believe it, but it is so.  Drones hang out.  They go to a particular place and fly around waiting for a virgin queen to show up.  Seriously.  Kind of a street corner gang thing!  And when she shows up.....an intense competition ensues to mate her.  She can be mated several times collecting semen from several drones, thereby insuring genetic diversity for the species.  Research shows a queen can be mated 5- 19 times.  Who counted??  Mating lasts seconds and is explosive.  Like, so explosive a human ear can hear the pop of the ejaculation!  It is also so explosive, the drone's endophallus (I suppose you could call this the drone penis) remains inside the queen and he falls to the ground and dies.  Poor drone.

As the summer winds down, the colony quits feeding the drones.  They are no longer needed.  And since they eat so much and take a lot of energy in care, the colony lets them die.  In fall, one will see dead drones scattered about as the colony prepares for the long winter ahead.

Then, in the spring, when another queen may be hatched, more drones are "raised" and begin to show up in the colony.  They are bigger than the worker bees.  A new beekeeper is often confused by a drone, thinking it is the queen, but their abdomen is really quite different.  Stocky and blunt and finished with a fuzzy butt of sorts.  The big eyes are a give-away too.

So how is it that all the drones die in the winter, new ones hatch in the spring, and their hangout places remain the same?  Year after year........  Some hypothesize that drones older than six days, have cells in their abdomen high in magnitite and are drawn to areas with some type of magnetic force.  Others believe their are environmental features that draw the drones to the same well-defined area year after year.

Field experimentation - conducted by using a virgin queen trapped in a cage and floated around with a balloon - show that the congregation areas are never less than 300 feet from an apiary (a collection of hives).  There can be as many as 200 hives represented by drones in these areas - now that's a gang of drones!!