The Value of Drones

While ‘natural beekeepers’ are employed to pondering a honeybee colony more regarding its intrinsic value towards the natural world than its chance to produce honey for human use, conventional beekeepers and the public most importantly less difficult more prone to associate honeybees with honey. This has been the reason behind the attention presented to Apis mellifera since we began our connection to them just a couple thousand years back.

To put it differently, I believe most people – when they think it is in any way – tend to think of a honeybee colony as ‘a living system that creates honey’.

Ahead of that first meeting between humans and honeybees, these adaptable insects had flowering plants and also the natural world largely on their own – more or less the odd dinosaur – and over a span of ten million years had evolved alongside flowering plants along selected people who provided the best quality and quantity of pollen and nectar because of their use. We can assume that less productive flowers became extinct, save for those that adapted to presenting the wind, as an alternative to insects, to spread their genes.

Like those years – perhaps 130 million by some counts – the honeybee continuously developed into the highly efficient, extraordinarily adaptable, colony-dwelling creature that individuals see and speak to today. Through a number of behavioural adaptations, she ensured a high amount of genetic diversity inside Apis genus, among the actual propensity from the queen to mate at some distance from her hive, at flying speed possibly at some height through the ground, with a dozen approximately male bees, who have themselves travelled considerable distances from their own colonies. Multiple mating with strangers from another country assures a diploma of heterosis – important to the vigour from a species – and carries its mechanism of option for the drones involved: only the stronger, fitter drones are you getting to mate.

An unusual feature of the honeybee, which adds a species-strengthening edge against their competitors towards the reproductive mechanism, is the male bee – the drone – is born from an unfertilized egg by a process generally known as parthenogenesis. This means that the drones are haploid, i.e. have only one set of chromosomes produced by their mother. Therefore means that, in evolutionary terms, the queen’s biological imperative of passing on her genes to our children and grandchildren is expressed in their genetic acquisition of her drones – remembering that her workers cannot reproduce and so are thus a genetic dead end.

So the suggestion I designed to the conference was a biologically and logically legitimate method of about the honeybee colony is as ‘a living system for creating fertile, healthy drones when it comes to perpetuating the species by spreading the genes of the most useful quality queens’.

Considering this style of the honeybee colony provides a wholly different perspective, when compared with the typical point of view. We could now see nectar, honey and pollen simply as fuels just for this system along with the worker bees as servicing the requirements the queen and performing every one of the tasks required to guarantee the smooth running of the colony, for the ultimate reason for producing excellent drones, that can carry the genes of their mother to virgin queens using their company colonies distant. We can speculate regarding biological triggers that create drones to become raised at times and evicted as well as killed off sometimes. We are able to consider the mechanisms which could control the numbers of drones being a percentage of the general population and dictate how many other functions they’ve already inside hive. We could imagine how drones seem to be able to uncover their way to ‘congregation areas’, where they seem to assemble when expecting virgin queens to pass by, when they themselves rarely survive over three months and rarely through the winter. There is much that people still don’t know and might never understand fully.

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