Drone Honey Bee

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Valentine’s Day in the Drone Congregation Area: Where Honeybee Queens Find Love in the Sky

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High above the honeybee hive, amidst the gentle sway of trees and the chirping of birds, lies a hidden realm known as the drone congregation area (DCA). This invisible airspace, about 100 meters wide and 15-30 meters above the ground, is a celestial love nest where virgin honeybee queens ascend to meet their destined mates.

Imagine a scene from a bee-themed rom-com. Thousands of male drones, driven by pheromones and primal instinct, gather in a swirling, buzzing cloud, eagerly awaiting their queen. The air hums with anticipation, a silent symphony of beating wings and hopeful drone hearts.

But why this elaborate aerial rendezvous? Why not mate within the cozy confines of the hive?

The answer lies in the unique biology of honeybee reproduction. A queen mates only once, and she does it with multiple drones – usually 10-20 – during a single flight. This “polyandry” ensures genetic diversity in her offspring, strengthening the colony’s resistance to diseases and environmental challenges.

So, how does this bee ballet unfold?

The Queen’s Call:

  • As a young queen emerges from the hive, her body releases a potent mix of pheromones, invisible chemical signals that announce her availability. These “queen substance” pheromones act like an irresistible perfume, beckoning drones from nearby hives.

The Drone Rendezvous:

  • Drones, equipped with special receptors for these pheromones, take flight, following the invisible scent trail like love-struck missiles. They gather in the DCA, forming a dense, swirling cloud, their excitement palpable in the buzzing symphony.

The Celestial Mating:

  • The queen, guided by the drone density, ascends into the DCA. As she flies, she releases even more pheromones, intensifying the drones’ ardor. The cloud condenses around her, forming a mesmerizing “drone comet” trailing behind her like a celestial fan.
  • Within this intimate dance, the most vigorous drones manage to mate with the queen. The mating process is swift and fatal for the drone. His endophallus, a reproductive organ, detaches inside the queen, providing her with a lifetime supply of sperm. As he falls from the sky, the remaining drones continue their pursuit, hoping for their chance at glory.

The Return of the Queen:

  • After several successful matings, the queen, now carrying the hopes of a colony, returns to the hive. She stores the collected sperm in a special organ called the spermatheca, using it throughout her life to fertilize her eggs.

The drone congregation area, though unseen by most, plays a vital role in the honeybee’s survival. It’s a testament to the intricate dance of nature, where love takes flight not in a candlelit corner, but in the vast expanse of the sky, ensuring the future of a buzzing kingdom.

What Is a Drone Laying Queen?

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Sometimes you may inspect a hive and be caught off guard by an excess of drone brood. Why is your queen laying so many drones? If you’ve stumbled on a drone-laying queen, you need to be concerned. Drones are very important to a hive and play a vital role. However, finding several layers of drone brood in your hive is neither normal nor healthy for a colony.

A healthy queen will lay a relatively small percentage of (male) drone honeybees. This happens mostly during the spring and swarm seasons—but, as a rule, not year-round.

Drone brood is unfertilized brood. Queen bees lay both fertilized eggs (female) and unfertilized eggs (male). In order for eggs to develop into regular female worker bees, they must be fertilized with sperm. When eggs are left unfertilized, they develop into drones (male). This balancing act should be a controlled and well-planned process to ensure that drones do not overrun the hive. After all, drones do not produce honey nor defend the hive.

It’s not difficult to tell if there’s a drone-laying queen in one of your hives. When a drone layer is present, all the eggs will be left unfertilized, creating far more drone brood than normal. The difference between worker brood and drone brood is easy to observe. Drone brood appears bumpy and lumpy, whereas female worker brood appears flat. This bumpy, dome-like appearance takes shape as large male drone bees grow and extend past the cell. A hive with too many drones is a liability. Beehives need a balance of worker and drone honeybees to be successful and thrive. Worker bees keep the colony running and sustainable, and drones do not.

Drone-laying queens are often caused by one of two reasons: either the queen has been poorly mated, or the old queen has run out of sperm. The core cause in both cases is that the queen’s eggs are not being fertilized.

At Wildflower Meadows, we have a responsibility to ensure the queens we sell are never poorly mated, reducing the likelihood of drone layers. We work to prevent this by allowing an extra week of testing before any queen is selected for sale. By giving the queens this additional time to prove themselves, we can assess the quality of brood laying, identifying any drone layers in the process.

Luckily, remedying a drone-laying queen is not difficult—although it’s not a happy ending for the queen. Even if the queen is young, there’s no chance she will successfully mate again in the future, meaning she must be removed immediately. Requeening the hive may give the bees a second chance, provided there are enough workers left in the colony to justify investing in a new queen.

If the colony is too small or weak, you may have a lost cause. You may just need to fold up the hive, merge the bees and brood into an existing healthy hive, and restart a new colony from scratch. Sometimes a hive as a whole can’t be saved, but the bees themselves can be salvaged.

Why Do Bees Produce So Many Drones?

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Drone bees often get a bad rap—they don’t produce honey, don’t defend the hive, and they consume vital resources. So then why do queen bees produce so many of them? The answer, put simply, is that there must be enough drone bees available at any given time in order to sustain the reproduction of bees and the viability of the species overall.

All queen honeybees must mate with drone honeybees. This mating never takes place inside the hive but rather takes place outside the hive while in flight. Several days after hatching, a queen bee will leave the hive for her first mating flight. Queens will only mate during a brief period of their lives; however, they mate with up to ten to twenty drones at a time, collecting and storing their sperm. By the end of her mating flight, a queen may have up to one hundred million sperm stored within her that she’s able to utilize for egg fertilization throughout the next several years of her life. Collecting sperm from multiple sources allows the queen’s offspring to be genetically diverse. This genetic diversity improves the overall health of the colony, furthering a colony’s ability to fight off disease.

The queen bee mating ritual happens at “drone congregation areas” where the queen is greeted by hordes of drone bees. Drones leave their respective hives—sometimes venturing miles away from their colonies—in hopes of being one of the few lucky suitors. Unfortunately, the process of successfully mating often results in the drone’s death as its endophallus is ripped off, leaving its abdomen open.

While many drones are lost due to successful mating, realistically, drones only have a 1 in 1,000 chance of mating with a queen—meaning that many drones don’t actually die from mating at all.

In addition to the loss of drones that meet their ultimate demise through mating, many drones are lost from other causes. The flight to drone congregation areas can sometimes prove to be a difficult feat, resulting in drone loss due to natural and environmental reasons. These losses are normal and need to be made up by excess drone production in the individual colonies that surround the drone congregation areas.

Promoting Drone Honeybee Production

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For a queen breeder or anyone interested in raising a large number of queens, producing drone honeybees on a large scale requires some planning and foresight.  The first consideration – and, perhaps of the highest importance – is having the most desirable breeding stock near and surrounding the apiary at exactly the right time.  If you are going to need drones, you obviously want to be raising the highest quality drones from the very best colonies that you have.  There is no sense in promoting drone honeybee production in undesirable colonies.  But how do you get your best colonies to produce the highest number of drones?

There are several key factors toward encouraging a colony to raise an abundance of drones.  Here are the top three in order of importance:

  • Pollen and Food Abundance
  • Seasonality
  • Drone-Laying Space Availability

The most significant factor for abundant drone production is having a plentiful source of pollen.  Natural pollen is far and away more superior.  And, a substantial quantity of that natural pollen is even better.  When an area is naturally rich in pollen, beehives can’t help but to produce drones, regardless of many of the other factors.  This is the reason that you will find the majority of California queen producers located in more or less the same area of California – an area that is known to consistently produce enormous amounts of pollen – hence drones, during the critical queen rearing months of April and May.

If you are trying to produce drones in an area that has poor or inconsistent pollen availability, then you either need to aggressively feed these colonies with pollen substitute, or consider moving the colonies – at least temporarily – to a richer area, so that the bees begin to raise drones.

Moving bees to rich pollen areas is often another advantage of California queen breeders.  Well before the pollen becomes abundant in their queen rearing apiaries, most California queen breeders move their strongest colonies into almond pollination.  The explosion of almond blossom pollen that occurs over the relatively short period of almond bloom turbocharges drone production.  In this way, most queen breeders enjoy an abundance of drones and quality drone brood well in advance of queen rearing.

The second key to promoting drone production is the season.  April and May – the spring – is the ideal season for drone production.  Bees are instinctively aware of the position of the sun and the timing of the seasons.  This is why they naturally ramp up worker brood production during the spring, even during times of drought, and then cut back on brood production later in the fall, regardless of the conditions.  As the days lengthen in spring, the bees begin to instinctively raise drone brood.  This means that if you are trying to promote drone production in a less-than-ideal season such as late summer or fall, you need to compensate by aggressively feeding pollen or a pollen substitute.  An abundance of pollen becomes even more important during the less-than-optimal months of the year.

Finally, anytime that you are aiming to promote drone production, you have to provide the queen ample space to lay drone brood.  Ideally, providing a frame or two of drone comb during a time of high pollen availability, and during the right season, will almost guarantee having more than enough high quality drones.

The Boys’ Club

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When a beekeeper looks inside a hive it is a very rare occurrence to find drone honeybees inside of the brood nest.  Either the worker bees do not tolerate drones near the brood, or the drones themselves have little desire to visit the center of the colony.  More often than not, drones can be found on the outskirts of the brood, usually on a frame or two at the very edge of the colony, hanging out together with lots of other drones – the classic boys’ club of sorts.

Many things about the drones are different from the worker bees.  Besides the obvious differences of sex, honey production (drones do not produce honey), stinging (drones do not sting), and their large body sizes and ridiculously large eyes, drones mature and live at their own, more leisurely pace.

Whereas worker bees emerge from their brood cells in 21 days, drones take an unhurried 24 days.  When worker bees emerge they “hit the ground running”; before long they are attending to the many tasks inside the hive.  Drones, on the other hand, mature slowly.  They are not capable of mating until they are at least 6 days old.  During this time, they appear to have not much to do other than to eat and relax.

Even eating itself is relaxing, because young drones do not even feed themselves!  When drones are born they quickly learn how to solicit workers for food – especially nurse bees, which will feed them a mixture of honey, pollen and brood food.  Then, after feeding, it’s back to another stress free day in their own little man cave . . .

Production Of Drone Honeybees

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Over the course of her mating flights, each queen bee will mate with up to 15 drone bees.  Most queen producers aim to create a scenario where at least 20 drone honeybees, and ideally many, many more, are readily available for each virgin queen bee when she heads out on her mating flights.  When producing queen bees for sale in large quantities, it quickly becomes obvious that the queen producer is also in the business of rearing drone honeybees.

At the height of the swarming season, especially when nectar is abundant, nearly all bee colonies instinctually produce large amounts of drones. Bee colonies will go out of their way to produce drone comb for the queens to lay drone eggs into, ensuring a steady output of drone honeybees. During these times of abundant drones, queen producers have it easy, with plenty of drones available to get the job done!

However, what about when drones are not abundant? It doesn’t always rain here in Southern California. Our summers are dry. Under these conditions, bees are not always inclined to produce drones on their own. When this happens, the queen producer must intervene, and supplement queen mating with additional drone stock. Much like our local ski areas in Southern California that often need to make up for a shortage of natural snow by blanketing their resorts with “snow making machines”, Wildflower Meadows has a similar ability to supplement the natural supply of drones by blanketing our mating areas with “drone rearing machines.”

Our drone production yards, like the one pictured above, are maintained in strategically placed locations surrounding the various queen mating yards. These drone production colonies, stocked with strong and excellent stock, are fed weekly throughout the entire season, both with syrup and pollen supplement – regardless of weather or environmental conditions. These colonies never know anything but abundance, and probably have no idea that they are in the midst of a drought. Life for them is good! The queens inside these colonies are confined to the lower box, along with easily accessible frames of drone comb and more than enough food. With this irresistible enticement, they effortlessly produce massive amounts of drones. The result? An entire apiary full of “drone rearing machines” and thousands of drones taking to the sky every day.

Drone Comb

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Because drones are some of the least appreciated honeybees among beekeepers, it follows that the frames of honeycomb that are set up to breed them would be equally under-appreciated.  A colony of bees will build honeycomb cells in two sizes, regular-size or drone-size.  Most natural honeycomb, and just about all “foundation” for sale by beekeeping supply companies is regular-sized, meaning that the brood that is raised will become worker bees.  After all, nearly all beekeepers prefer worker bees that make honey over so-called “worthless” drone bees that mainly consume honey.

Regardless of the efforts of the beekeeper, however, all beehives have a strong instinct to raise a certain percentage of drone honeybees, especially during the swarm season in the spring.  To rear new drones, the hive requires that some of the cells in the honeycomb be of the larger drone-sized variety.

Since it creates all of its own comb, a feral or top bar hive has no problem creating some drone-sized comb of it own, and adding it to the existing worker-sized comb that it already has.  A managed Langstroth beehive, however, often does not have an easy way to build drone-sized cells.  In this type of hive, the beekeeper provides all of the frames of honeycomb, which are nearly universally worker-sized.  As a result, the bees themselves have to improvise where and how they can construct drone comb given the limited space to do so.  Often the bees construct some makeshift drone comb between the boxes.  Or, if some old honeycomb is damaged or has a hole in it, the bees eagerly replace the damaged area with drone-sized comb.

Once in a while, a beekeeper runs into an old frame, which as a result of being heavily damaged and re-repaired by the bees, consists nearly entirely of this rebuilt drone comb.  These types of frames, one of which is pictured above, show up often in commercial beekeeping operations where frames are apt to be damaged by regular handling.  As a rule, commercial beekeepers dislike these frames and often discard and replace them as soon as they are discovered.

On the other hand, queen rearing outfits, such as Wildflower Meadows, love drone comb!  The more drone honeycomb, the more drones available, and the better the mating chances and better quality of the resulting queens.  At Wildflower Meadows, we like to make sure that our best colonies have at least two frames of drone comb to produce the maximum quantity of drones.  The frame pictured above, worthless to many beekeepers, is “drone gold” to us!

 

Drone Honeybees With White Eyes

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Here is something you don’t see too often: otherwise healthy drone honeybees that have white eyes!  Recently we ran into a colony that was full of white-eyed drones.  One of our staff beekeepers, caught off guard, declared that he had discovered “zombie drones!”  Actually, no, it does happen from time to time that healthy drone bees can be seen with the mutation of white eyes.

Why is it that only drones show the white-eyed mutation, but not the workers bees?  The answer lies in how recessive genes work.

Among bees in a hive, drone bees are more apt to express mutations from recessive genes than other bees.  A drone bee is unique and different from the two types of female bees (workers and queen bees) in that it is developed from an unfertilized egg.  As a result, a drone bee has only one set of chromosomes – effectively only one parent.  Therefore, with only one set of chromosomes, recessive genes can be expressed more readily without being overridden by a corresponding dominant gene.

These white-eyed drones appear perfectly normal; they move around the hive like other bees, eat honey, relax, and live an apparently normal drone bees’ life.  Don’t be fooled, however.  Their life is not normal.  For them, there will never be any mating; no flights, no lying to drone congregation areas, nor looking for queens.  These drones are more or less stuck inside the hive; because, due to their white eyes, they are blind.

 

Drone Bee

Meet Mr. Drone

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Imagine a honeybee that doesn’t collect nectar, doesn’t produce beeswax, doesn’t take care of the larva, doesn’t nurse the young bees, doesn’t protect the colony, and can’t even sting.  The drone honeybee’s sole purpose in life is to mate with a queen.  Notice the enormous eyes.  They come in handy for finding a suitable mate.

Interestingly, the drone honey bee never mates inside of a colony.  The drone leaves the colony for mating approximately six days after hatching. Drones normally fly in the afternoon, provided the weather is warm and sunny, with little or no wind.  When it is time to mate, a drone loads his huge body with honey, like a tanker, and heads out for flights of a mile or longer.  His destination: special areas called “drone congregation areas.”  Drone congregation areas are specific geographic locations where groups of drones wait for the arrival of virgin queen bees by detecting their pheromones.  A virgin queen will mate with ten to twenty drones, but the drone has only one mating event, which is both his first and last.  Shortly after mating with a queen, the drone dies.