When we think of honey bees, most often we think of the Queen Bee or worker bees. The fact is, most honey bees are female. Depending on the season, drones (male honey bees) make up from 4 to 15 per cent of the entire colony. That’s right, they peak at 15%! That’s a drop in the bucket for a colony of 60,000 bees!
It’s true, the queen and the workers are the bees we’re most familiar with, but despite their small numbers, drone bees have an important role in the survival of honey bees. Since they carry only the DNA of their queen, the son of a good queen helps carry on that line when he does the one job he has.
Queen bees are raised to be queens. They emerge as queens and they fight to the death with any rival. Winner take all. The winner will determine the strength and personality of the entire colony. After the queen knocks out any competing queens she then gets ready for the important job of mating. She’s going to be responsible for the entire population of the colony for a few years, so she takes her job seriously.
After a week or so of being completely pampered by her retinue, she’s ready to take flight. She’ll go out and pass through the drone bar from which she will be pursued by willing, eager drones. During her mating flights, she will mate with a variety of drones, but not with one from her own colony. That helps diversify the gene pool, thus creating stronger bees.
If a drone is successful in getting the chance to mate, he does so while in flight and will likely leave his genitalia behind with the queen as a sign of a successful mating flight. She will hopefully mate with many more drones. He is one and done. But what a way to go!
Should a drone be unsuccessful, he will return home to mooch off his sisters until he is ready to try again. Eventually, if he isn’t done in by mating, he will be kicked out of the hive as a drain on the population (come on, he doesn’t work, he just consumes the fruits of the labors of others) and since he’s incapable of caring for himself…well, he probably really, really regrets that he never met the queen of his dreams.