#9. It's time we had THE TALK - you know the one - about the birds & the bees.

The only people who I know for sure read this blog are my friends and family, most of whom know absolutely nothing about bees.  In order for us all to be on the same page, as it were, some information about the structure of bee society, their life cycle, and their sexual reproduction is warranted, I think.

It must be said that if my loved ones know nothing about bees, I know next to nothing.  But, because everything is relative, I look to them as if I command a vast wealth of bee knowledge.  Not true, I'm afraid.  So I'm hoping that I don't misrepresent the facts.  As I said in one of my earlier blogs, the learning curve is steep.  And if I misstate something, I will make corrections at a later time and point out the errors to readers in a future post.

First, there are three classes bees in every honey bee colony: the queen, of which there is only one at any given time (although I understand that there are exceptions to this rule); drones, which are male bees; and the workers, which are nominally female, but who cannot mate.

The queen has but one function - to lay eggs.  Drones also have only one function - to mate with a queen.  Workers, however, wear many hats during their 6-week lifetimes.  When workers first emerge from the 6-sided cell that has housed them from egg to adult, they act as nursemaids, feeding and caring the developing bees, making wax, and building comb.  New bees (I guess you could call them 'newbies', or, better still, 'newbees') cannot yet fly well, so they are most effective inside the hive.  As they age, they adopt other functions, like security, stationed around the hive entrance, guarding against marauding animals and bugs - including "robber bees" from other colonies who may come to steal their honey.  And yes, the guards can tell the intruders from their own.  Finally, the bees graduate to foragers, and these fully mature bees are the ones we see working the flowers.

Now to the sex part.  When a new queen hatches from her 'queen cell', shortly she must leave the hive to mate.  She can only mate in the air - on the fly, so to speak - and she can only mate during the first 10 days or so of her life, so she has to do it fast and make it last.  This is how it happens:  first, the queen makes a few 'dry-run' flights to orient herself to her hive; she must be able to find her way back home once she's been mated.  When she's ready, she will make a solo flight to a magic area in the sky where drones gather.  These drones, usually from other hives, hang out in a group, buzzing around, hoping to get lucky (or unlucky, as you shall see), sometimes as high as a couple of hundred feet above the ground.    I'm not making this up.  There's a name for this airspace - the Drone Congregation Area, and it even has an acronym - the 'DCA'.  But I'm going to rename it the 'Drone Zone', or 'DZ'.  Masses of them fly around, a great cloud of testosterone with only one purpose - to try to mate the queen.

So the queen leaves the hive and takes flight.  She flies up through the cloud of bees.  The first drone who can grabs her and hangs on, inserting his stinger, which is actually not a stinger.  Workers have stingers, but in the drones the stinger is modified to act as a penis.  The same pump mechanism that pumps venom from a worker bee's stinger into your bare foot, let's say, pumps semen into the queen's bee 'vagina' ( - sorry, I have absolutely no idea what it's really called).  And, as with the worker bee who will die after stinging, the drone only gets one shot; when the stinger/penis enters its target, it, along with its sperm pump, gets ripped out of its owner's abdomen, effectively disemboweling him.  If there are any men reading this, you should be clenching your bums and crossing your legs right about now.

The queen returns to the hive, where the workers remove the stinger/penis.and clean her up.  And off she goes again, to be ravaged, over and over by up to 20 drones, as each of the previous suitors, now dead, hurtles earthward - dead, but triumphant!, having sacrificed his life to accomplish his one true purpose - to spread his seed.

I'm exhausted just thinking about all of it.  But the life of the queen and her colony is worth investigating further, and I'll do that in the next post.

Beekeeper factoid:  there are over 200,000 beekeepers, both amateur and professional, in the U.S., and they manage over 3 millions hives.