The Need for Drones

While ‘natural beekeepers’ are used to thinking of a honeybee colony more in terms of its intrinsic value on the natural world than its capability to produce honey for human use, conventional beekeepers and also the public most importantly less difficult more prone to associate honeybees with honey. It is been the main cause of a person’s eye provided to Apis mellifera since we began our connection to them just a couple of thousand in the past.

To put it differently, I suspect most people – should they consider it in any way – tend to imagine a honeybee colony as ‘a living system which causes honey’.

Prior to that first meeting between humans and honeybees, these adaptable insects had flowering plants and also the natural world largely privately – more or less the odd dinosaur – and also over a lifetime of tens of millions of years had evolved alongside flowering plants together selected people who provided the best quality and level of pollen and nectar for use. We could think that less productive flowers became extinct, save for individuals who adapted to using the wind, as an alternative to insects, to spread their genes.

Like those years – perhaps 130 million by some counts – the honeybee continuously evolved into the highly efficient, extraordinarily adaptable, colony-dwelling creature we see and talk to today. Through a amount of behavioural adaptations, she ensured a high amount of genetic diversity from the Apis genus, among which is the propensity in the queen to mate at far from her hive, at flying speed possibly at some height from your ground, having a dozen roughly male bees, which have themselves travelled considerable distances off their own colonies. Multiple mating with strangers from foreign lands assures a qualification of heterosis – fundamental to the vigour of any species – and carries its own mechanism of option for the drones involved: exactly the stronger, fitter drones ever get to mate.

An unusual feature with the honeybee, which adds a species-strengthening edge against your competitors on the reproductive mechanism, is the male bee – the drone – arrives from an unfertilized egg by the process called parthenogenesis. This means that the drones are haploid, i.e. only have one set of chromosomes produced from their mother. Therefore ensures that, in evolutionary terms, top biological imperative of creating her genes to future generations is expressed in their own genetic acquisition of her drones – remembering that her workers cannot reproduce and are thus a genetic dead end.

Hence the suggestion I made to the conference was a biologically and logically legitimate method of in connection with honeybee colony will be as ‘a living system for producing fertile, healthy drones when considering perpetuating the species by spreading the genes of the best quality queens’.

Thinking through this model of the honeybee colony gives us a wholly different perspective, in comparison to the typical viewpoint. We are able to now see nectar, honey and pollen simply as fuels for this system along with the worker bees as servicing the needs of the queen and performing all the tasks needed to ensure that the smooth running with the colony, for that ultimate function of producing good quality drones, that will carry the genes of their mother to virgin queens off their colonies far. We could speculate as to the biological triggers that cause drones to be raised at peak times and evicted and even got rid of sometimes. We are able to consider the mechanisms which could control facts drones like a area of the entire population and dictate what other functions they may have inside the hive. We can imagine how drones appear to be able to uncover their method to ‘congregation areas’, where they appear to accumulate when looking forward to virgin queens to pass through by, whenever they themselves rarely survive over three months and hardly ever over the winter. There exists much that individuals still do not know and may even never grasp.

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