The Need for Drones

While ‘natural beekeepers’ are utilized to thinking of a honeybee colony more in terms of its intrinsic value towards the natural world than its capability to produce honey for human use, conventional beekeepers along with the public at large tend to be very likely to associate honeybees with honey. It has been the explanation for a person’s eye presented to Apis mellifera since we began our connection to them just a few thousand years ago.

Quite simply, I think many people – when they think of it at all – often make a honeybee colony as ‘a living system which causes honey’.

Ahead of that first meeting between humans and honeybees, these adaptable insects had flowering plants and the natural world largely privately – give or take the odd dinosaur – well as over a duration of millions of years had evolved alongside flowering plants together selected people who provided the best quality and amount of pollen and nectar because of their use. We are able to believe that less productive flowers became extinct, save for those that adapted to using the wind, as opposed to insects, to spread their genes.

For all of those years – perhaps 130 million by some counts – the honeybee continuously become the highly efficient, extraordinarily adaptable, colony-dwelling creature that individuals see and speak to today. Using a quantity of behavioural adaptations, she ensured an increased amount of genetic diversity inside the Apis genus, among the actual propensity in the queen to mate at a ways from her hive, at flying speed and at some height in the ground, which has a dozen or so male bees, who have themselves travelled considerable distances using their own colonies. Multiple mating with strangers from another country assures a qualification of heterosis – important to the vigour of any species – and carries a unique mechanism of choice for the drones involved: merely the stronger, fitter drones have you ever gotten to mate.

A silly feature in the honeybee, which adds a species-strengthening competitive edge to the reproductive mechanism, would be that the male bee – the drone – arrives from an unfertilized egg with a process generally known as parthenogenesis. Because of this the drones are haploid, i.e. have only a bouquet of chromosomes based on their mother. As a result means that, in evolutionary terms, the queen’s biological imperative of passing on her genes to our children and grandchildren is expressed in her genetic investment in her drones – remembering that her workers cannot reproduce and therefore are thus a genetic no-through.

Therefore the suggestion I designed to the conference was a biologically and logically legitimate means of about the honeybee colony is as ‘a living system for producing fertile, healthy drones for the purpose of perpetuating the species by spreading the genes of the best quality queens’.

Thinking through this label of the honeybee colony provides us a wholly different perspective, when compared with the conventional perspective. We could now see nectar, honey and pollen simply as fuels for this system and also the worker bees as servicing the demands of the queen and performing every one of the tasks needed to make sure the smooth running of the colony, for that ultimate function of producing high quality drones, which will carry the genes of the mother to virgin queens from other colonies far. We can easily speculate for the biological triggers that create drones to get raised at certain times and evicted and even got rid of other times. We are able to consider the mechanisms which could control the numbers of drones as being a area of the overall population and dictate what other functions they’ve already inside hive. We can easily imagine how drones appear to be able to get their approach to ‘congregation areas’, where they appear to gather when looking forward to virgin queens to pass by, after they themselves rarely survive greater than a couple of months and hardly ever with the winter. There’s much we still don’t know and could never understand fully.

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