Since I haven’t posted a quiz for a couple of years, I decided to resurrect the one on honey bee drones. The quiz is just for fun and I’m not collecting names or any personal data. This quiz is a trial run, mostly to see if I can get the new software to work. Just […] Read more
So what is the real lifespan of a drone? If you check beekeeping websites and blogs, you can find any number you want to believe. I uncovered dozens of estimates—everything from 10 days to six months—in just a few minutes of searching. So I left the web and tried books with well-known and well-informed authors […] Read more
During an interview about bee stings earlier this week, I happened to mention that drones don’t sting, which lead to a discussion of male bees in general. The fact is, none of them sting. As it turns out, the stinger is a modified ovipositor. An ovipositor is an egg-laying organ that transmits an egg from […] Read more
Something about laying workers brings out the wizard in us. We think up convoluted ways to rid ourselves of these miscreant creatures, most of which don’t work. Carry the box to the edge of the apiary, turn in a circle with your eyes closed and a drone in your teeth, shake the bees out of […] Read more
Beekeepers are frequently advised to put a queen excluder under the brood box to keep a new package from absconding. Since the queen can’t leave, the colony won’t leave either. This is good advice that works well as long as you remove the excluder once the bees have settled in. Since drones cannot leave through […] Read more
You could put it that way. The drone arose from an unfertilized egg and so he has one set of chromosomes from the queen (his mother) and no father. But his mother arose from a fertilized egg. That means she had two sets of chromosomes, one from her mother and one from her father. Since […] Read more
I love drone eviction. I get a vicarious pleasure from watching the little workers take down their lazy male nest mates. In spite of this being a blurry photo, I like the image of the worker mandibles ready to a take a chomp on brother bee. I just don’t see worker mandibles spread and ready […] Read more