THE DATING-n-MATING LIFE OF HONEYBEES

Went looking for that pesky elusive queen again today.  Found larvae, so she must be there somewhere.  In the process, found a small few of the special oversized beeswax comb-cells the ladies fabricate to induce drones.


Can you imagine that?  These ladies evict and kill redundant males each fall, then in the spring those same ladies just order up some males to date a hive queen.  


But, wait.  Their queen has already mated once, for life.   So what they're doing is creating drones to mate with a just-in-case new queen.  ("just-in-case mating males"?)   


In case the old queen needs to be "superceded", or in case they have plenty stores to support the natural colony-replication event called "swarming."   When the colony swarms (subdivides), the ladies first create a dozen or so new-queen larvae, then the first new queen to emerge and sting the other queen larvae to death (who needs competition for those nice, "pure" drones) leads half of the colony on a pilgrimage to find a new hive home.

What all this sorts down to is this.  The 75,000 worker ladies are creating a couple dozen males to compete for mating with a virgin queen, and any male that does will die immediately, while the males that don't will lay around all summer getting fat on the ladies' free honey until they boot the guys out the front door. 

Life is tough.