What Are Drone Bees?

learnbees ^ | 1/4/24 | Jane Ten

[DallasBiff]

Drone honeybees can be tricky to spot when surrounded by thousands of other bees.

So how do you identify them?

Easy. By looking at their eyes.

Drone bees have massive eyes that touch each other. This comes in handy for helping them spot queens to mate with. In contrast, female bees have smaller eyes that don’t touch.

[DallasBiff]

I know a fascination with bees, but when I was in 6th grade in late September there was a swarm of bees, and the teacher said they are drones, and kicked out by the workers(females).

[Libloather]

I control ‘em. Don’t worry about it.

[Wilderness Conservative]

I first thought this was an article about mini spy drones that look like flying insects. They exist.

[Magic Fingers]

I only have (enormous) eyes for you.

[irish guard]

I’ve been raising bees for ten years. Whenever we open a hive, drones are easy to spot. An active hive in midsummer has about 40,000 - 50,000 bees. There is a queen, who is really hard to spot, thousands of workers and maybe 3,000 - 5,000 drones. They are physically bigger than all the female workers and easy to identify.

They serve no really purpose to the hive, other than to mate with a new queen. When the old queen gets old, she is unable to lay enough eggs. The workers create special sells within the hive that look like a peanut. Once hatched, this new queen will kill all other queens that hatched from similar peanut cells, kill the existing queen and round up the drones for a sex flight. She’ll fly high, sometimes mating with more than one drone.

Any drone that mates with a queen suffers an awful fate. After boinking the Queen, his junk falls off and he dies. She returns to the hive and starts laying eggs. Most healthy queens live about 4-5 years.

[dfwgator]

[ClearCase_guy]

https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/register_drone

[Olog-hai]

Why is the queen hard to spot? She’s also larger than the workers, and more slender n shape than the drones.

Drones can’t sting, either. They have their “junk” where the stinger is on the girl bees.

[Doctor Congo]

“spot queens to mate with”

oh my

[BitWielder1]

They have four little propellers instead of wings?

[Vendome]

I had an ex girlfriend who droned on and on and on.

stung a little bit too...

[Delta 21]

Male sperm carrier of the species. Your not gonna find much else about them other than they are fat, eat up all the saved honey.

Has there every really been any other task that they do?

[blackdog]

They are male honeybees.

[irish guard]

When the queen is moving around in the hive, there are all sorts of female worker bees. She has a thorax that is longer than the rest of the workers, but it’s harder to see thatpn the dozens of the drones, which have a fatter, thicker thorax and just look different.

[Round Earther]

There are days I can find the queen in two minutes and other days I can check each frame a couple times with no luck.

To find the queen, you don’t look for a bee that looks different, you look at the movement, the queen and her attendants who move in a differently.

[Keyhopper]

We use to put a dot of red nail polish on her, makes her easier to spot.