Drones and queens

The queen will fly out on a sunny day to the congregation area and mate with many drones. When she enters the mating zone a cloud of drones will follow her till one gets so close he can move over her flying body and grab on to her. The mating lasts a couple of seconds. The force of the sperm release propels the drone backward and his penis snaps off. That is the end of the drone. No happy returns for him. Considering the short time the mating takes it is amazing that somebody managed to photograph it. My drawing is from a picture I found on the Internet. The queen stores the sperm of this and all the other drones she mates in her spermatheca to be doled out at will. A young virgin queen has a limited time to mate. If she can’t fly because of bad weather she won’t get mated and will lay only unfertilized eggs. She’ll become a drone layer. That is why I’m so worried about the continuing bad weather we’re having. But maybe that delays the virgin queens being born too.

Corraun Mountain a mating site?

Once on a summer day I climbed Corraun Mountian. I started out from the northeast where the lonely little lakes hug the steep incline to the top. It’s a quietly beautiful but slightly creepy place that the sun only reaches very early on a cloudless day in high summer. When I climbed the top of the mountain was out of sight all the time so I didn’t really know where I would end up. Finally I came to a shoulder north from the top. It was so steep I crawled on all fours. On the last bit a lovely sweet smell reached my nose. It must have been the heather that was in bloom. Around me circled an enormous amount of bees. Where did they come from? There were only two beekeepers on the peninsula and one was my neighbour in Polranny and the other an old man in Owenduff Tonragee; both miles away. When I told the story to Timothy the beekeeper he was very interested. It might have been one of the elusive drone congregation areas, he reckoned. The drawing of Corraun Mountain was made from the north or Belfarset side.

Drones

The world of bees in which I submerge myself is getting more interesting but also more unsettling each time I look into a new phenomenon. This time it is drones, the male bee. They are born out of unfertilized eggs and do not work. Their sole purpose is to mate the queen. The fate of drones is that they either die after mating or are forced to leave the hive in the winter. To prevent inbreeding drones don’t mate the resident queen but go to a collective destination with all other drones from up to 200 different hives. There the drones wait for the virgin queens to arrive. A bit like the old Irish ‘dancing in the crossroads’ where the young men of the different villages gathered, some of them with a penny whistle or a violin or a uilleann pipe and wait for the girls to turn up to dancing and courting with. The drones visit more than one mating site and if they do not strike lucky they have to go all the way back to the hive for refueling. As there are many more drones than queens and even thou the queen mates more than once, there are still plenty of drones that don’t get laid. The same congregation areas are used year after year and as new inexperienced drones arrive every year the place must be clearly signposted in bee-speak but unseen and unheard of by humans.