The following is a small excerpt from my previously published book, The Beekeeper's Guide.

Three Makes One…Continued

In our last session, we learned about the Queen. Now it is time to learn about the drone.

The Drone

The honey bee drone is the male bee. The drone takes the longest to fully develop. After being laid as an egg, it turns to a larva in three days. On the 11th day the larva is capped and doesn’t emerge until the 24th day. The drone is larger than the worker bee and is most recognizable by its large eyes. The drone’s eyes are twice as large as the eyes of the worker bee. Curiously enough, the drone doesn’t have a stinger. The drone has only one job in the hive, to fertilize queens. Because they have relatively little utility to the hive, in most hives there will only be somewhere between 300 and 700 drones. Almost never will you find more than 1000 drones in one hive. If you find more, it may be indicative of a missing queen and a laying worker bee or it could be the rare occurrence of a queen bee that is unable to fertilize her eggs even though she has mated. We’ll discuss these problems later in the book in the chapter titled Spring—Busy as a Bee.

The drones will not typically mate with a virgin queen from their own hive, instead they seem to “hang out” in drone congregation areas and wait for a virgin queen to arrive. Think Main Street on a Saturday night in any small town. Boys waiting for girls, what seems to be a recurring theme in nature. No one really understands how these congregation areas get chosen, but they are where the drone’s life purpose is accomplished. Mating occurs midflight, about 200 to 300 feet in the air. Here is where his big eyes come in handy. The first drone to see a passing virgin queen is normally the first to achieve their life ambition. When a virgin queen passes by on her nuptial flight, the drones make their move. A drone will mate with the queen in a period of about 5 seconds and then he dies. Sadly, his man part is torn away in the ecstasy of the moment and he subsequently falls to his death.

The vast majority of the drones in a hive never accomplish their main life goal of mating with a queen. Instead, in the parsimonious manner so often found in nature, the hive refuses to share precious resources with the useless drone through the winter and instead, evict them from the hive in the fall. No drones live through this mass eviction—and the hive is drone-less until early next spring when the queen begins to lay drone eggs again.

If you watch your hive carefully in the fall, you will see two, three or even more of the worker bees wrestle the drones out of the hive. One by one, the drones are pulled and pushed from the hive. Once outside, the worker bees take flight, dragging the hapless drone to his doom. Some distance away from the hive, the workers abandon the drone and fly back to the safety of the hive. The drone is unable to find his way home and becomes food for passing birds or succumbs to the harsh environment.

My book, The Beekeeper's Guide, is available for purchase on Amazon right here.

© 2015, Stone Golem Publishing, All rights reserved--no part of this may be used without express written consent.

**The picture is from Pixabay and marked "labeled for reuse".

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