It’s Good To Be The King

Listen up men. If you’re reincarnation-inclined, and trying to decide what to come back as in your next life, may I suggest a honeybee drone? Forget what you’ve heard about the queen being king of the hill—when it comes to honeybees, drones have the life.A honeybee drone is sort of a genetic anomaly. When mating season looms and drones are needed, workers build drone comb, with cells that are more spacious than standard honeycomb cells. The queen lays an unfertilized egg in each of these cells, and a drone is hatched. Unfertilized, meaning the drone has only one parent, the queen bee. How she knows when and where to lay an unfertilized egg, not to mention how an unfertilized egg turns into a male honeybee, is way above my pay grade. But apparently she does, and it does.

Although there are only a few hundred drones at peak season in an average hive, they’re easy to spot in a crowd. A drone’s eyes are twice the size of a worker bee’s, and the drone itself is bigger and stockier than his sisters.

Here’s the job description: The drone hatches into a cozy custom-made pocket after the weather has warmed up and all that winter unpleasantness is over. He is coddled and fed and cared for until he’s all grown up, at which point he towers over his thousands of doting sisters.

In late spring, flowers perfume the air, and a young drone’s thoughts turn to romance. Tanked up on home-grown honey and muscle-building pollen, he heads out of the hive into the bright sunshine, looking for the girl of his dreams.

First stop, the local singles club, aka drone congregation area, which might be near the hive or up to 2 miles away. Hovering as high as 100 feet above the ground with a few hundred to a few thousand other eligible bachelors, he spots a queen. Lovely, long and lean, elegant in stripes, a come-hither look in all five of her eyes.

Here’s where it gets dicey. If he gets lucky, it’ll be the last thing he does. A drone’s naughty bit, called the endophallus, explodes when the deed is finished. The rest of him plummets to the ground, done and dusted.

After the queen has had her way with a dozen or so of her suitors she heads back home for some pampering from her minions. The rejected drones mope back to their own hives, where we will assume they console themselves by saying she wasn’t all that pretty anyway.

Aside from their embarrassment over still being alive, things aren’t bad in bachelor bee-land. Drones don’t forage for food, take care of babies, or perform any useful hivekeeping tasks. They laze around, eating and scratching themselves, while the girls do all the work.

The next sunny day finds them out cruising for love again, and so goes the drone’s life. Which, at 90 days, is about twice as long as the average worker bee’s life. This is largely because the drone’s sisters work themselves to a state of tattered exhaustion in a mere six weeks. But free from all the honey-making, larvae-raising and so forth, drones can conserve their strength for mating. They are the original boy toys.

Not a bad deal, really (except for that part where the naughty bits explode). Until summer starts to wane. The girls put up with those freeloading drones when the living is easy, but when the frost is on the pumpkin, mating season is over and their presence is no longer required.

The remaining drones are kicked to the curb. Dead weight, they are killed and tossed out the door like so much flotsam.

Maybe we should rethink that reincarnation thing.