Love Is Blind – For Bees!
Bee lovemaking takes places during flight. And it seems that bee male drones not only present their loved queens with sperm but also with a dose of a blinding toxin. But why?
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Queens aren't really meant to work. Usually, their main job is to give birth to successors to the throne. And it's not really different from bees. Queen bees may lack some of the features we would consider normal for bees but they do have something most bees don't have. Sexual organs. Yet, a queens life is not easy. Daily, she has to lay around one and a half thousand eggs – roughly the equivalent of her own body-weight.
The life of a queen bee starts in a much larger chamber when compared to a normal drone. For fifteen days she lives in it and swims in royal jelly until the chamber gets too small for her. Then she gets fed for about another week. And then, her big day comes. It's only once in her lifetime but she gets a bit of freedom. After than its sort of a prison for her. In the tombs of her hive, she will lay eggs every day without seeing daylight for years.
But during her “wedding flight” she gets to be free. Well, sort of. She doesn't fly alone but she gets a chaperon of protectors. During the flight, she flies roughly 30 meters high where a large group of yearning male-drones is already waiting. The male-drones have a tough life too. To even have a chance to reproduce they have to hit the vaginal opening with their penis. If they manage to do that successfully their penis gets ripped off and they die. And remember, all of this is happening in flight. This can take up to three days of promiscuous flying around during which the queen fills her sperm-bank.
The thing is, the male-drones don't like the fact that the queen is promiscuous. They would prefer if the queen used only their sperm and not from many different partners. So, they developed techniques h on how to make it harder for other male-drone to have a chance to breed. One of them, for example, is a protein that kills competitors sperm. But now we found a new trick. They not only give the queen their sperm but also a poison (or more precisely a protein with hormonal activity) that makes the queen go blind over time. As you might guess, being blind make it hard for the queen to fly and thus shortens her promiscuous period in life.
Hopefully, we humans will never have to use anything similar in our love lives.
Sources:
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Yeah love is blind.
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The toxins were found to be contained in the male bees’ seminal fluid - a substance that helps maintain sperm.
In the study, the researchers presented queens with a flickering light, following sex with a male.
They found that in the first few hours after sex, the queens were unable to detect this light, indicating that they were blind.
However, the queen bees’ sight returned within hours, indicating that the blinding effects were temporary.
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