Soon
after emerging as an adult a new queen has to mate, but she doesn't do
it with drones from the same hive. She flies from the hive to a special location to congregate with drone bees from other places. No-one know how
bees from different colonies decide where their common congregation area
should be, nor how drones know when to be there waiting for a queen to
come along. The queen will mate with a good number of drones to create
as much genetic diversity as possible, but she'll only do this on a few
mating flights over one or two days and then she'll never mate again.
She stores the drones' sperm in her (wonderfully named) receptaculum seminis and releases her horde it very slowly
to fertilize the thousands of eggs she will lay in her lifetime.
So
how do bees do it? With a bang! (With a few bangs, actually.)
The
queen flies high - at about 200
feet - and a drone's large eyes scout her out. While still flying, the
drone and queen somehow manage to fasten onto each other with special
clasps; the drone
then parts the two flaps at the end of queen's abdomen and then they're ready for the banging. In what's called the primary
explosion, two stalks blast out the back of the drone's abdomen into the queen's abdomen. At the end of each stalk is a tiny red ball
containing sperm. The secondary explosion is when these two red balls,
now inside the queen, burst open and splatter sperm all over the place.
That's job done - the
drone falls off and dies pretty quickly, though (so I
like to imagine) in ecstatic relief. Once the queen has finished her
mating flight she'll head home, guided back by her worker bees which
stand at the hive using their wings to fan pheromones towards her as a
sort of homing beacon.
Here, James Ellis shows how a drone ‘explodes’:
I’d rather he didn’t kill a little thing to show us – that was how I was shown, too.
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