The life and death of honeybee Drones
Drones are probably the most underappreciated and least understood of all honeybees. However, they have a vital contribution to the life of the colony.
Drones are born of an unfertilized egg. The queen bee carries all the eggs and sperm to lay up to 2500 eggs every single day of her life. If an egg is fertilized as the queen lays it, it will be a female worker bee. If she leaves the egg unfertilized, it will develop into a drone.
It isn’t the queen who makes the decision of whether an egg will be a worker or a drone. That decision is made by the worker bees who are making the honeycomb egg cells.
The drone cells have to be bigger than worker cells to accommodate the larger body of the drone bee. When the queen backs into a cell to lay an egg, research suggests, if the hairs on the sides of the queen brush against the narrower worker cell, she’ll lay a fertilized egg. If these hairs don’t touch the sides of a larger, wider cell, she lays an unfertilized drone egg. It’s the workers who decide how many drones the colony will produce, not the queen.
In about 26 days, the drone will emerge from his cell. The production of sperm cells already began while the drone was pupating, but he won’t be sexually mature for two to three weeks after birth.
The drone doesn’t have any job in the hive and just hangs out. He doesn’t even feed himself but is fed by worker bees.
The drones serve no other purpose in the hive but to mate with queen bees. They don’t forage for nectar or pollen. They can’t even defend the hive because drones don’t have stingers. The drones don’t even feed themselves, but are tended to by workers.
A drone’s body is rounded at the end, as compared to a worker’s or even the queen’s body. They have stingers; drone’s don’t. That part of their body is made up of their reproductive organs.
In about 2-3 weeks after being born, the drones will start taking off from the hive in search of a queen with which to mate. They generally wait for warm, calm flying weather, and usually in the spring or early summer when there are the most queens in the air on their own mating flights. Their entire purpose is to be ready for a queen when she takes to the sky.
Drones from many colonies will collect up in the air in places called Drone Congregation Areas. There they turn on their pheromones to help attract any queen that might fly by.
These pheromones are essentially turned off while the drones are just lounging in the hive. They only turn them on during mating flights. The rest of the time, they exist as harmless roommates in the hives. When clusters of drones congregate, the air around them becomes saturated with their mating pheromones and the queens are more likely to detect them.
Drones have very big eyes compared to other bees. This is so they can spot the queens as they come whipping through the drones congregation areas.
The vast majority of drones will never fulfill their life’s purpose. Persistent as they are, they’ll take off from the hive every day in search of that elusive queen. If they fail to find one, they’ll return to the hive to be fed and rest for the next mating flight.
Drones, however, will visit other beehives. The guard bees at the entrance of these hives usually let them in. Drones don’t rob other hives. They can’t sting and are of no threat to the bees being visited.
For some “lucky” drones, they do spot a queen while out on their mating flight. Honeybees mate in the air. The drone has to catch up to the queen and mate with her while flying at full speed.
While she is in the drone congregation area, a queen often will mate with several drones. This is the drones’ big moment, what they’ve waited for their whole lives and the moment that fulfills their lives’ purpose. It is also fatal.
Fatal Attraction
In mating with the queen, the drone’s reproductive parts are ripped from his body. He then falls from the sky, dead. But he has delivered his sperm into the queen and passed on his genes to future generations of honey bees.
The drones that mate never return to the hive. Those that don’t mate come back home after another fruitless day flying around with the other hapless drones.
Other than mating, the drones serve no other purpose in the hive. They don’t clean, they don’t make wax or honeycomb, they don’t take care of the young bees.
When mating season is over, or when winter is approaching, or when resources run low, the bee colony can’t afford to have any freeloaders just hanging out. Drones contribute nothing but still consume food and demand care from the workers.
The drones then got to go!
Worker bees will decide that its time for the drones to get evicted from the hive. The drones will very unceremoniously get dragged to the door and tossed out, forever.
Arguably, the drones who suffered the painful death during mating are the ones who got off easy. When the drones are just evicted from the hive, they’ll either starve to death, die from exposure, or get eaten by some predator.
Honey bees are fascinating creatures. The lives and tragic deaths of the male drone bees are no exception. What could be seen as a life of leisure inside the hive where they are being cared for, fed and have no work to do may seem easy, but they suffer a violent death no matter what direction their life takes them.
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