The Need for Drones

While ‘natural beekeepers’ are employed to thinking about a honeybee colony more when it comes to its intrinsic value on the natural world than its capability to produce honey for human use, conventional beekeepers as well as the public as a whole less complicated more likely to associate honeybees with honey. This has been the main cause of the eye directed at Apis mellifera because we began our association with them just a few thousand in years past.

In other words, I suspect a lot of people – should they it’s similar to in any way – usually imagine a honeybee colony as ‘a living system that creates honey’.

Ahead of that first meeting between humans and honeybees, these adaptable insects had flowering plants as well as the natural world largely on their own – more or less the odd dinosaur – as well as over a length of ten million years had evolved alongside flowering plants and had selected people who provided the very best quality and quantity of pollen and nectar for his or her use. We are able to believe that less productive flowers became extinct, save if you adapted to working with 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 we see and meet with today. Through a quantity of behavioural adaptations, she ensured an increased amount of genetic diversity from the Apis genus, among the actual propensity from the queen to mate at a long way from her hive, at flying speed possibly at some height in the ground, with a dozen or so male bees, that have themselves travelled considerable distances using their own colonies. Multiple mating with strangers from outside the country assures a degree of heterosis – important to the vigour associated with a species – and carries its own mechanism of choice for the drones involved: only the stronger, fitter drones are you getting to mate.

A silly feature of the honeybee, which adds a species-strengthening edge against your competitors towards the reproductive mechanism, could be that the male bee – the drone – arrives from an unfertilized egg by way of a process called parthenogenesis. Which means that the drones are haploid, i.e. only have a bouquet of chromosomes based on their mother. As a result ensures that, in evolutionary terms, the queen’s biological imperative of creating her genes to our children and grandchildren is expressed in their own genetic purchase of her drones – remembering that her workers cannot reproduce and so are thus a genetic no-through.

So the suggestion I made to the conference was a biologically and logically legitimate strategy for concerning the honeybee colony will be as ‘a living system for producing fertile, healthy drones when it comes to perpetuating the species by spreading the genes of the finest quality queens’.

Thinking through this model of the honeybee colony gives us an entirely different perspective, when compared with the typical point of view. We could now see nectar, honey and pollen simply as fuels because of this system as well as 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, to the ultimate intent behind producing good quality drones, which will carry the genes with their mother to virgin queens business colonies far away. We can easily speculate regarding biological triggers that can cause drones to be raised at peak times and evicted or perhaps got rid of other times. We can look at the mechanisms that will control the numbers of drones being a percentage of the entire population and dictate what other functions that they’ve in the hive. We could imagine how drones look like capable of finding their method to ‘congregation areas’, where they seem to assemble when awaiting virgin queens to feed by, after they themselves rarely survive more than a couple of months and hardly ever with the winter. There’s much that individuals still do not know and could never understand fully.

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