What the hell.. i was taught that all worker bees were sterile females. That the hive did not produce as males except when need to reproduce an then once he did his one job he died off... or am i thinking ants
Evolution; They are doing it RIGHT...
Nice try-—But a Male BEE is called a DRONE. They do not collect pollen. They stay in the hive and pork the queen. The worker bees are genetically FEMALE but do not mature to egg laying status until they are fed “Royal Honey” and then activate their ovaries. Somebody needs to tell the author about the Birds and the Bees!!!
I should have gotten on the climate change bandwagon decades ago—it explains much of my youthful behavior. /S
This is gibberish on a number of levels. It does not describe the behavior of social bees at any time during evolution or since creation. Bees visiting flowers do so to gather nectar and or pollen mostly for feeding to juveniles. Males social bees are not equipped to do that.
The article probably refers to the specialized solitary male bees which may pollinate certain species of orchids because they mistake part of the orchid flower as a female solitary bee of the same bee species. If the time of male bee sexual activity does not coincide with the blooming period of the orchid there may be a problem. However, none of that information seems to appear in the article.
This makes no sense. The bees are early. The flowers are early. Everything is early. So how could they now be “out of synch”? They are all just earlier.
Plus, it appears that things are still being pollinated.
And anyway, I thought the problem was that the bees were dying, not that they were having excessive sex.
Of course, anytime I see East Anglia, I laugh too hard to think about science.