Drones are males in a bee swarm whose task is to fertilize females. The rest of the drone owes nothing, except to warm the brood in the cold. Duration and quality of life are determined by bees, they decide when a drone is supposed to be born and when to end a life. While the “man” is useful to them, they feed him, heat and cherish him, but when the collection of honey ends, the bees throw him away, and he soon dies.
Drone Description and Role
The drone can be confused with bees by tinning. Their names are similar, but the individuals themselves are different from each other. Drone is a male bee, and tinder is an underdeveloped female, developing from bees feeding the queen. She appears in the nest when her mother is either not at all, or she already ceases to produce. If it weakens very much or even dies, then the bees feed each other with bee milk and several pieces develop in the eggs. Due to the fact that the eggs are not fertilized by a drone, the funders are born underdeveloped and die quickly.
A male individual will not be able to fertilize any bee, therefore, in every hive there should be a queen.
Female bees are working bees and the queen (uterus) of bees, and the male population is drones. The drones are lazy and do nothing, they have only one role - to fertilize the uterus. One family in one season displays more than a thousand drones.
What does he look like?
Drones can be seen from the last month of spring to the last month of summer. These insects fly away in the afternoon, and arrive home only in the late evening. A distinctive feature of the drone from ordinary bees is its rather large size in comparison with the queen of bees and with the bees themselves. It weighs 250 milligrams and a length of 15 centimeters. The drone has perfectly developed wings.
Interestingly, the drone is missing:
- the sting;
- wax glands;
- proboscis, which acts as the collection of food and moving it somewhere.
Therefore, without extraneous care, he will not survive, he cannot even eat himself.
The nature of the drones has endowed everything that is needed for mating, this is a wonderful charm, excellent eyesight and high flight. A drone sees the female on the fly and catches up with her faster than her rivals in order to mate. In males, wings are very well developed, they can fly high and long distances in search of the uterus.
The drones are very voracious; more than twenty kilos of honey are consumed per kg of these bees. This is for 2 or 3 months, they do not live longer. Males devour 4 times more honey than females that produce this honey. In order to survive 1 kilogram of drones, they eat more than half a kilogram of honey per day, this is almost 16 kilograms per month. During the summer period, 1 kilogram of insects will consume 50 kilograms of honey. There are approximately 4,000 drones per kilogram.
The flight of drones is accompanied by a loud buzz. When he sits down on a certain rest board he makes sounds as if he had fallen from fatigue.
Life cycle
If few drones are grown in the bee family, this means that the uterus is old and the chances are minimized that it will be fertilized. After all, if many drones surround the female, all the better. Before mating, the drones fight for the female, weak and helpless individuals are excluded, as a result, the strongest remain. Due to this, future bees will have good genes.
Hard-working bees take care and grow drones, and they begin to do this in May, and only finish when they need to collect honey. In one family there are about 400 drones, but it also happens that in a single family there can be a whole thousand, or even one and a half thousand males.
Drones are located in the cells as follows:
- from above;
- from below;
- On the sides.
The egg stage lasts 3 days, and the larvae last 7 days. The bee larva is fed with royal jelly, and then with beef and honey. Then the cells are sealed, by which you can determine where the drone is. Such cells are more convex, since the fruit is large and it will need more oxygen.
After exiting the cell, the drone feeds on for about 10 days, gaining strength for future mating. A week after birth, they fly out only to familiarize themselves with the external environment. But after 14 days, he is already flying to find his womb.
The drone catches the uterine substance on the fly and then realizes that it is somewhere nearby. Only to distinguish it is possible only at a high distance and not lower than 3 meters from the ground, and when it is already next to the uterus, it includes vision.
One uterus is fertilized immediately by 6 to 8 bees, and after successful fertilization, the drone that has fulfilled the duty dies. Males live in the house where they were born, but as long as they have their own sperm bank, they are kindly accepted in any other housing. Wherever they are, bees feed them, perceiving them as clients for the queen of bees.
After the main honey collection, they no longer need drones; they are sifted out to save food. At first, they simply are not allowed to access honey, and then they starve, weaken, and are forced out of the nest, where the drones die.
A drone can be left to overwinter only if there is no uterus, or it is not fertilized. If there are drones in the hive in the winter, this indicates a dysfunctional bee swarm. How long the drone lives will depend on several factors:
- Does the uterus exist in the hive;
- whether it is capable of fertilization;
- general condition of the swarm;
- weather.
Significance in the Bee Family
First of all, the reader will have a question: why are the drones needed in the bee family if they cannot feed themselves, have voracity and do nothing to help the bees toilers? But they are the only individuals due to which the genus of bees continues, they are a flying sperm bank. To fulfill his duty, the drone must be hardy and strong, because you have to travel long distances to find the uterus. Also, they will have to compete with other drones, hunting the same as himself.
The drones that the uterus gave birth to carry the same genetic material as hers. Each male bee has chromosomes, of which there are only 16 pieces, and the uterus has 32. As soon as two weeks after hatching, the drone is ready to fertilize the uterus.
Outside the hive
In the hive, drones do not pay any attention to the uterus, but as soon as it flies out in search of sperm, several individuals fly after it as a guard, driving away birds and other insects. They mate in flight, as soon as her semen is filled, she squeezes the camera and the genitals of the drone, which the latter inseminated her, breaks off. The drone immediately dies and they, together with the female, fall to the ground.
Also, once a year, all the drones flock to a certain place far from their home. At this point, they circle in a radius of 100 meters, waiting for the uterus. Remoteness from its apiary is due to the fact that by mating with the uterus of another family, you can avoid kinship. For the same reason, several drones fertilize it at once, so that there is a mixture of sperm.
In the hive
The drone also has useful features that they “apply” while in the hive:
- Recently it became known that the increase in the mood of bees depends on the number of young animals. It is recommended to put frames with sushi in cells with drones in the hive. Bees will begin to grow drones and there will be no swarm.
- A little earlier, everyone was sure that the drones were created and capable of only breeding offspring. It was recommended to cut out all the drones so that there was an opportunity to collect more honey. Now, on the contrary, it is believed that drones are not only a flying bag of sperm, but they also push the bees to work.
- Drones are also capable of heating their hive in the winter. At the first frost, they gather in a heap, covering with their body brood. Thus, they sacrifice themselves for the sake of the future bee family.
Beekeepers have studied that if all drones are exterminated, then bees collect honey worse and lazier, so today they don’t touch a certain percentage of drones.
The importance of drone
In a bee family there are no important and not important individuals, they all participate in certain actions. The uterus breeds bees, and drones directly help her in this. The family lives working bees that hatch from a fertilized egg. Therefore, the work of everyone is important, it is inappropriate to think who is superfluous in a bee swarm. Yes, the drones are voracious, because of them the amount of honey in the hive is rapidly decreasing and beekeepers understand this, but it is worthwhile to understand that if there are no such losses, then there will be no honey at all.
There are pluses - in the fall, when drones die, you can understand what condition a particular bee family has. If there are many dead drones near the house, then everything is fine in the family, but if there are few or none at all, this means that the uterus should be changed.
Questions and answers
Question: Why does a drone die after insemination?
Answer: A drone to mate its body, which is responsible for the birth of bees, releases outward, which until that moment was inside it. It is almost the same that a person’s internal organs will come out. Therefore, the drone dies without a chance of survival.
Question: Is it possible to determine the breed of bees by the appearance of the drone?
Answer: Yes, you can! For example, in Caucasian bees, the drones are black, and the mongrel drones are gray. The breed "Italian" is red, and the forest drones are dark red.
Drone in the bee family plays only one role, but the main thing is fertilization. He is no longer capable of anything, even to feed himself or move food to another place, because he does not have everything to carry out these processes. Hardworking bees feed them from birth, and after their mission, the drone dies.
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