June 2026 Apiary Update

June brings us Father's Day so we are going to talk about drones, the only males in the hive.  Drones have a pretty sweet, if short, life.  They take longer to hatch than the female workers, as because of that they can harbor a pest called Varroa.  These mites (which would be dinner plate-sized if bees were as big as we are!) crawl into the cell where the drone larvae is living, just before it's capped.  There, the mite does its little mite thing, and has enough time to multiply before the drone hatches.  For this reason, a major component of mite reduction strategies involves removing that frame of drone brood and freezing it, to kill the drones (which aren't really needed) along with the mites.  Those frozen frames will then replace others in the apiary that need to be pulled out, and provide a source of protein for the worker bees.

But I said that they have a pretty sweet life, and that really doesn't sound like it at all!  Fair enough - for the drones that are not frozen while larvae and hatch out, they just wander around the hive, munching on pollen and honey, just living their best drone lives.  They will go out and mate with a queen, and nature is so smart that it has drones fly a shorter distance than the queens, to ensure the queen is not mating with her own sons!  However, this is where their lives could end - once they mate, their male organ breaks off in the queen and he dies.  The queen then goes to mate with the next drone, who pulls out that organ, mates with her and then dies.  This goes on for 8-12 drones before the queen finally flies back to her hive, ensuring some genetic diversity for her colony.

If a drone doesn't get frozen, nor goes out on a mating flight, the worker bees will kick him out come the fall, so that he isn't a drain on resources.  So, a drone either has a fun but short life, or is a couch potato before being kicked out because winter is coming.