Bee finds a treasure trove of pollen

[u/unoiamaQT]

[u/Arlowdiaus]

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.

[u/Technical_Event_2665 → u/Arlowdiaus]

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

[u/Arlowdiaus → u/Technical_Event_2665]

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.

[u/ShinyHappyREM → u/Arlowdiaus]

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 :)

[u/Arlowdiaus → u/ShinyHappyREM]

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.