Proving Stereotypes Wrong
Madison Miller
Through the eyes of the uneducated, me and my fellow drone honey bee’s have been accused of being “lazy”, “Ne’er-do-wellers”, and “good for nothing”. This stereotype often stems from the fact that we, as drones, have no stingers, glands, nor pollen collecting devices like workers or queen bee’s do. We also are unable to lay fertilized eggs unlike the other bees. However, I am a highly important part of my colony and perform the vital role that nature has left in my hands. To prove this stereotype wrong, I will take you through my role as a drone, and by the end, you will realize just how essential me and my friends are to our colony. To do so, I will start at the beginning.
My life starts the day a queen or a worker bee lays an unfertilized egg in a cell. In order to start my development, workers will feed me royal jelly for only the first two to three days. Afterwards, my protein will come from honey and pollen. By day ten, my cell is capped, and my larva spins its own cocoon while inside the cell and develops into a pupae. By day twenty-four, I am a grown adult bee and ready to emerge from my cell to start my life duty. Once I am an adult bee, I will be larger and more robust looking than the workers and queen in my colony. My eyes will be larger in order for me to easily scope out a virgin queen when it comes time for our nuptial flight, and my abdomen will be thicker. I will also have more antenna receptors and longer legs. Of a colony, about twenty percent are drones and around eighty percent are workers. Therefore, there will be roughly around five-thousand to twenty-thousand of us drones per colony. However, this will also depend on the colony’s strength and what time of the year it is. Drones are needed more towards spring and summer when the virgin queens are ready to mate.
An unfertilized egg means that I have no father, however, I do have a grandfather. Since a queen did not need to mate with a male in order to lay my egg, I would be considered a haploid. Haploid means that I have only sixteen chromosomes compared to queens and workers who have thirty-two chromosomes. All sixteen of my chromosomes came from the queen who laid my egg. However, if a queen wanted to lay a fertilized egg in order to make a new queen or workers, she would need the help of a drone bee. A worker cannot mate with a queen, only a drone fulfills this role. During mating season, a swarm of drones will fly from their hives and convene in the sky. These are called Drone Congregation Areas (DCA). This congregation will take place about ten to forty meters above the ground and about ninety to one-hundred and twenty meters away from the apiary. These congregations can get up to thirty to two-hundred meters in diameter. A virgin queen will then leave her hive and join our cloud of drones. As soon as the queen enters our swarm, around seventeen to twenty-four different drones will actually get to mate with the queen. Each one of us provides eight to eleven million sperm, and the maximum capacity for a spermatheca is around five and-a-half million sperm. In that case, only a small percentage of each drone’s sperm will migrate into the spermatheca of a queen, but each drone will mostly be equally represented. Unfortunately, after one of us mates with the queen, we will die. This happens because our endophallus is quite literally ripped from our abdomen after mating occurs and sticks to the now not so virgin queen. Therefore, without me and the other drones, queens would not be able to lay fertilized eggs since our semen is necessary for the production of these fertile eggs.
With mating being the one huge role I play in my colony, it is easy for that stereotype to come back and deem me and my fellow drones as the useless bees throughout our hive. The people making these stereotypes fail to think about how essential this role is for the future of our colony’s genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is the range of different inherited genes within a species. In these Drone Congregation Areas where a queen will mate with around twenty different drones, these drones can be from all different colonies causing the genetic pool to broaden. Genetic diversity has many positive effects such as enhancing a bee’s chance to resist pathogens, harmful pesticides, and allows the colony a greater chance at adapting to changing environments. With climate changing as it is today, this will become more and more important. It is crucial for a colony’s success because the greater the genetic diversity, the greater the chance the colony has to survive.
You may be wondering what happens if one of us does not fulfill our role of mating with the queen. The drones that were unable to mate in the Drone Congregation Area fly back to their hives. After the mating season, the weather starts to get colder as fall approaches. Soon, one by one, the workers kick us out of the hive. Literally! Queens do not necessarily mate in the colder months, but instead more around summer time. Since our bodies are larger and take up more space in the hive, and since we do not do much housekeeping around the hive, we get the boot. Unfortunately, this leads to our deaths. We can die from being painfully stung by the workers, the harsh weather, or from simple starvation.
When it comes to the colony, we as drones are not useless nor unimportant. Although we only have one major role to play, queens would not be able to lay fertile eggs without mating with us. In that sense, no more queens nor workers would be able to be born since their eggs must be fertilized. Therefore, no colony would survive. As said earlier, we bring the genetic diversity to the colony as well making the hive successful. We may not have all of the tasks and housekeeping duties as a worker bee does, but that worker bee exists because of us drones. Every one of us has an important role in the colony, and our hive would not thrive with the absence of any of us.
Madison Miller wrote this as an essay for Jennifer Berry’s class. The essay was required to be bee related.
