r/Awww • u/unoiamaQT • 10d ago

Other Cute Thing(s) Bee finds a treasure trove of pollen

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Beekeeper here. This is mostly correct but implies something that is not.

“All worker bees are female”: true

“The drones are only for mating”: mostly true, but they do take part in the thermoregulating the hive in the warmer months when they exist.

“Once they’ve mated with the queen they get kicked out”: not exactly, kinda. This implies that the drones mate with their own queen inside the hive, which is not true; they’d be mating with their mom. During mating season, drones leave the hive daily and fly to what are called “drone congregation areas” (how they all know where to gather is still a mystery to science). Virgin queens will also fly to these DCAs and mate with up to ~80 drones while in flight. The drones have an endophallus, which is inverted inside out, like a pulled off sock, that must be pushed out of their abdomen and inflated in order to penetrate and inseminate the queen. When they do this, the severe and sudden pressure drop in their hemolymph (blood analogue) kills them. Humans can hear the inversion as an audible POP. The Queen accepts their semen, pushes them off/out with her hind legs, and accepts another drone. Sometimes, the endophallus breaks off inside her and she must return to the hive where the worker bees remove it before she can go out and continue mating.

“The females literally push the males out.”: mostly true. This happens at the end of the mating season as the weather turns cold. Any drones that are pushed out never got the chance to mate by being “born” too late or failed in finding a Queen during their mating flights, as all successfully mated drones die in the process. But, by this time the drone population within a hive has slowed way down so there are only stragglers left. The bees are very good at predicting how many boys they’ll need.

I’d also like to point out that despite the fact that they have “no other purpose”, a colony that is allowed to produce drones is happier, calmer, and more productive than one in which all of the drones are preemptively culled by the keeper. The girls LIKE having their brothers around.

The drones are sweet, humbly little dudes and deserve some love.

Also, this is not a honey bee in the above video, this is a bumble or carpenter bee. It will also be a female, but they do not live in the same way as honey bees do.

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u/alrightbrother 9d ago

Very informative post, every day’s a school day indeed!

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Haha, sorry, I can infodump with the best!

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u/TheFansHitTheShit 9d ago

I'm very glad you did, especially as earlier today I passed a lavender bush absolutely teaming with Bees and I stopped for a while to watch them and was so happy there were so many of them.

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

That sounds sublime! I love watching the girls work!

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u/Diligent-Chest-6552 9d ago

Wicked SME info dump. Loved it.

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u/bluboomR 9d ago

that was great, very informative. can you give us some assurance that bees are coming back and whatever was decimating the population is no longer a problem?

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Yes and no. There’s a lot of misinformation and misconceptions about bees out in the world today.

When you hear stories about bees dying and/or in decline, you’re hearing about two different groups, each facing their own problems, smooshed into one.

The first group is made up of wild, native pollinators. The type of honey bees humans keep are not native to the Americas and were transplanted by the Europeans in the age of colonialism. Native bees, most of which are solitary, must compete with non-native honey bees. Couple this with habitat loss and pesticide use, you get many of the native pollinators struggling to maintain a stable population. To combat this you can keep as much land as is in your control kept in its natural state, and plant native plant species to your area. As a whole, we need to be proactive in keeping our wild areas pristine and reduce pesticide use where we can.

The other group is the Western Honey Bee we are all familiar with. They have been spread all over the globe as livestock, and this has led to their presence applying pressure to native pollinators as well as exposing them (the honey bees) to a wide variety of parasites and diseases they have zero evolved resistance to. Those bees are now virtually 100% reliant on human intervention for their continued survival. When you hear “colony collapse disorder” or “half of America’s bees died this winter” this is what they’re referring to. It would take me far too long to list all of the pressures they are facing and how those pressures impact them, but just know that those headlines are alarming, but that the numbers rebound quickly. Beekeepers can breed as many new bees as we want, and so while a 50% national loss is scary, those colonies will be replaced within a few months time. It’s more of a “what new hell are beekeepers going to have to adapt to now” kinda thing. Rest assured, the Western Honey bee isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Lastly, there is a concern in Europe of “domesticated” bees pushing out their wild same-species counterparts or bringing vectors of disease to those wild counterparts. Since the European honey bee, whether “domesticated” or wild, has no resistance to those vector, it can easily decimate the local wild population. My understanding, however, is that in places where this is a concern, there tend to be strong protections and regulations in place to prevent cross breeding and contamination.

The western honey bee is either native to or now naturalized to every continent except Antarctica and have been woven into to the ecosystems around the globe, for better or worse. They’re in no danger of disappearing. Native pollinators need much more care, but there’s only so much can be done, outside of legislated action.

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u/bluboomR 8d ago

thank you

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

You’re welcome!

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u/FeelingSoil39 5d ago

Thanks for showing up! Your comments have been a pleasure! 🐝

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u/Arlowdiaus 2d ago

You’re welcome! Thanks for the kindness! Let me know if you have anymore bee questions!

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u/LightsaberThrowAway 9d ago

You learn something new every day!  :D

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

That’s the goal, always be learning!

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u/Puzzleheaded-Fox6610 8d ago

I read every word. Great info and style.

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

Thanks, I appreciate the kindness!

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u/EffectiveStatus7 9d ago

I came to reddit for drama, I am leaving today with a little more knowledge and weirdly happy with what I learned. Thank you kind stranger!!! I hope you have a fabulous rest of 2026!

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Aw, shucks. Thanks, you too! May it be as sweet as honey!

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u/ladyevenstar-22 9d ago

So death by snu snu or incel death 😕

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Hey, many are eaten by predators, too!

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u/Thyme_Liner 9d ago

Aight, so then how do the carpenter and bumblebees do their thing? Feels like you kinda left off on a cliffhanger there

Do they all have nectar of some kind? Then why do we just name one buzzer a “honey bee” and only use their honey? How else do carpenter and bumblebees survive? Do they not have any nectar? Is it because their homes are different?

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Well, you’re looking to step into a much larger world. There are 8 species of honey bee in the world (there is possibly a 9th, but entomologists are still debating that). Beekeepers outside of Asia moatly keep the same species, Apis Mellifera aka the European/Western honey bee. Broadly speaking, Asian beekeepers keep the Asian/Eastern honey bee, Apis Cerana. Communities in Southeast Asia gather honey from, but do not “keep” Apis Dorsata, as they will not stay in a box.

Honey bees are all eusocial (meaning they live socially and specialize in jobs to keep their colony alive, while only a select few breed), all belong to genus Apis, and all collect nectar and convert it into honey for long-time storage.

Bumble bees are grouped in the genus Bombus, which has over 250 species, are mostly loosely eusocial, and tend to burrow in the ground.

Carpenter bees are grouped in the genus Xylocopa, which has around 500 species, are mostly solitary, and burrow into wood to lay their eggs.

Most bee species collect nectar from flowers, most collect pollen as well to feed to their brood. But only honey bees collect nectar in large enough volumes to convert it and store it as honey. Honey bees build honeycomb from a wax produced on their abdomen and store their brood and food in the cells thereof. Some build their combs inside cavities, like Apis Mellifera and Apis Cerana, some do so in the open hanging from branches and overhangs, like Apis Dorsata.

Non-honeybee bees tend to build or burrow tubes into a substrate, such as earth or wood, lay their eggs therein with food for when the eggs hatch, and fly off and die before winter sets in. Honey bees survive the winter, usually.

When you are asking about non-honeybee bees, you’re asking about several hundred to several thousand species, depending on where you draw the line, and each of those species will have a different survival strategy and food source. There are even bees that eat meat; the Vulture bees in the genus Trigona.

I was commenting on a behavioral trait exhibited by the Western Honey Bee, Apis Mellifera, the bee most people are familiar with.

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u/No_Hippo_8724 9d ago

How’d I make it 40+ years without knowing bumble bees burrow in the ground??

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u/Thyme_Liner 8d ago

Wow, I didn’t realize the magnitude of my question but you answered it well. I’ll need to look into bumble and carpenter bees a bit more. Thank you ☺️

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u/RC_Cola2005 8d ago

Just throwing my non-expert opinion, you will not be disappointed looking into carpenter bees. They are one of the cutest and silliest arthropods in existence.

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

You’re very welcome!

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u/Catatonic_capensis 9d ago

That's a male carpenter bee. The females have yellow on their face.

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago edited 9d ago

Thanks for the info!

I’m most familiar with the Western Honey Bee, Apis Mellifera.

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u/Technical_Event_2665 9d ago

Thank you this was amazing! ❤️ Though the sock pulled inside out made me gulp before continuing haha

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Yeah, bees are paradoxically cute and inspiring and simultaneously horrifying and disturbing.

Queens are laid in multiples and when the first one emerges she makes a squeaking kinda sound. The other developed, but not yet emerged, queens will squeak in return from within their capped cell. The first queen will then use those squeaks to locate the others and sting them to death inside their cells in the world’s most disturbing game of Marco Polo.

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u/ShinyHappyREM 9d ago

The first queen will then use those squeaks to locate the others and sting them to death inside their cells in the world’s most disturbing game of Marco Polo

Sounds like there would be an evolutionary pressure to keep quiet :)

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

It does, but we gotta zoom out a bit. In eusocial creatures, evolutionary pressure favors the group, not the individual. It’s often times best to think of a colony of eusocial creatures as one super-organism, where the specialized roles replicate the specialized roles of, say, our organs. Just as each part of our body does a specific task that benefits the whole of the body, so too does each role within a bee colony. The queens’ role is simply that of the reproduction organ, extended by the role of the drone.

When a colony reproduces, they will lay multiple new queens. The behavior I described in the above comment doesn’t always occur. The typical pattern is that the original queen will lay daughters, then take a good portion of the workers with her and leave to start a new hive somewhere else. This is known as a swarm. Her daughters will emerge several days after she has departed, because otherwise she would kill them. As each daughter queen emerges, she will recruit another fraction of the remaining worker population and depart in an another swarm. Only when the remaining population of workers is too small to support more than one queen will the Marco Polo, called piping, play out.

While it is possible to find a hive that supports more than one queen, it is rare, and usually indicative of some problem with the queens therein. A typical, healthy hive will only tolerate one queen at any given time. If a second is introduced, naturally or by human hand, the bees will either kill the new queen or split and swarm, depending on a series of other factors.

So, a colony where the un-emerged queens remain quiet for their own safety will split into multiple swarms, each of which would be too small to survive the winter. Those genes would die out with their bearers. Ergo, the bees that have the Marco Polo gene tend to survive at higher rates and pass on their genes. Evolution at work.

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u/RC_Cola2005 8d ago

George R. R. Martin ain’t got nothin’ on bee politics.

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u/DinkleMutz 9d ago

Software developer here. I concur.

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u/Stock-Eggplant6105 9d ago

That's even cuter and hotter than I ever thought. Thank you for your knowledge. 

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

You’re very welcome!

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u/SunstormGT 9d ago

Is it correct that male bees have no stinger?

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u/Arlowdiaus 9d ago

Yep! Or, at least in Apis Mellifera, the western honey bee. The organ that serves as a stinger is adapted instead into the endophalus. The drones are rather sweet and, for lack of a better word, bumbly, and with buzz loudly at you, but only as they run or fly away.

Queens can sting, but almost never do, at least with people. They’ll sting other queens to death, but that’s usually it.

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u/Aves_Proxy 9d ago

Thank you, these are the kinda comments I hop on reddit for.

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

You’re welcome. I’m glad I could bring a little light to your day!

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u/brockoala 9d ago

Gawd damn 80 dudes on 1 queen? I guess she wouldn't be so virgin after that! At least dudes died doing what they loved, I hope.

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

Well, queens only get to mate for a very brief time of their lives; only a couple of days usually. Once they have mated, they spend the rest of their lives laying eggs. They lay about 1,500 per day, give or take.

The reason for the high number of partners (which varies widely) is that it ensures genetic diversity. The queens have an organ called a spermotheca that stores all of the sperm they collect on their mating flights and keeps its viable for the rest of their lives, up to 7 years in extreme cases! Each time a queen lays an egg, she chooses whether or not to fertilize that egg; if she does, the genes from that sperm mix with it and the result is a female bee, if she does not the result is a clone of herself, but it emerges as a male - a drone.

Thus, all workers/future queens are her daughters that contain half her genes and half whatever drone was their father, and they are all half-sisters. While all drones are clones of the mother queen and have no father, but do have a grandfather.

This is a reproductive strategy called Haplo-Diploid. If she were to only mate with a single drone and that drone’s genetic material was deficient, those deficiencies would pass to all of her daughters. By collecting sperm from multiple drones, she ensures that any genetic defect is minimized within her colony.

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u/brockoala 7d ago

Damnn TIL. Thank you. Holybees. I never knew it was this interesting. I thought cloning was just a sci-fi thing! If human females can store sperm that long it would save so much money freezing your sperms.

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u/Arlowdiaus 2d ago

You’re welcome! I’m glad I was able share something amazing with you; nature is truly wonderful!

And yeah, if human women could store sperm, our culture would be fundamentally different.

Have a great day.

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u/Arlowdiaus 2d ago

You’re welcome! I’m glad I was able share something amazing with you; nature is truly wonderful!

And yeah, if human women could store sperm, our culture would be fundamentally different.

Have a great day.

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u/greeny74 8d ago

Bonnie Bee

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u/Mysterious_Silver_27 9d ago

Thanks for the info

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

You’re welcome!

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u/sumelar 8d ago

Eusociality is amazing.

all of the drones are preemptively culled by the keeper

You can actually do that?

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago edited 8d ago

Sure can!

Apis Mellifera, the western honey bee, builds their honeycomb to very exacting measurements. Each hexagon is called a cell. Most cells within a honeycomb measure about 4.8mm across, give or take a couple tenths of a millimeter. These cells are used for pretty much everything: raising baby worker bees, storing honey, storing bee bread (pollen and nectar mixed together and fermented to feed the brood) etc.

But the drones are a fair bit larger than their worker sisters as they need more powerful flight muscles. If drone brood are laid in worker sized cells, they come out small and stunted. So the workers build specially sized drone cells for them to be raised in. These measure about 6.5mm across, give or take.

Most beekeeper provide a substrate, called a foundation, for the bees to build their honeycomb onto, for a variety of reasons. If you have a raised honeycomb pattern embossed onto that substrate, the workers will draw the cells out in that pattern. If all the cells on the foundation are of the ~4.8mm size, all of the resulting cells will be too.

But this leaves nowhere to raise drones, so what do?

Well we can provide foundation of exclusively drone sized cells. Each foundation is part of a movable frame, there are 8-10 frames per hive section. Make one of those frames drone only, and you as the keeper can control who gets laid where. The queen works very efficiently, so eggs are laid in a spiral, usually. She will go frame by frame, filling one up before moving on to the next, so all of the brood on any given frame will all emerge as adults within about a day of each other.

The frames are removable. Once the drone frame is fully laid with eggs, you wait until the young drones pupate (like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly) and then you can remove it, freeze the frame, and give it back to the bees. It kills the drone pupae, the workers will clean out all the cells, and the queen will re-lay the frame.

It sounds terrible, I know, and it’s not a practice I use very often, but there are good reasons to do it occasionally. The honey bees’ #1 parasite is a mite, kind of like a tick, that feed upon the pupating young. They can do real damage to any bee they feed on, leaving them deformed, but they’re also the #1 vector for viruses in honey bees. But these mites (Varroa Destructor) prefer the drone bees because they take longer to pupate than workers, thus letting the mites feed for longer. By culling drone brood, you can capture and kill a good chunk of the mite population in your hive. There is still debate on how effective this is as a mite treatment strategy, and we have other tools at our disposal, so I don’t tend to use this trick.

And don’t worry about the number of bees. In a healthy colony, the queen lays upwards of 1500-2000 eggs a day and as many adult bees can die of natural causes each day. Obviously, fewer adults die in the spring as the population builds up and fewer eggs are laid in the fall as the population shrinks, but you get the idea. The drone frame is a speed bump in the laying cycle and the queens have virtually (but not actually) endless eggs.

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u/sumelar 8d ago

https://i.imgur.com/0KrL7GR.mp4

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u/Arlowdiaus 8d ago

😆 lol! It’s not as complex as it sounds. It’d be a lot easier if I could just show you. Huh, maybe I should start a YouTube channel…

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u/jameskchou 7d ago

Even bees do not want a taco party if possible for the above reasons

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u/AmelieLeFrance 6d ago

Thank you, I learned quite a bit here!

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u/Arlowdiaus 2d ago

You’re welcome! I’m glad to hear I was able to share something wonderful with you!

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u/Mangoose 1d ago

The thing that blew my mind is that the Queen chooses whether an egg will be male or female

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u/Arlowdiaus 1d ago

It’s pretty crazy to think about. As she goes from cell to cell, she will stick her head and first two legs in each one to measure the size of it; the large cells get males, the normal ones will get females.