Drone
Lexikon
The drone is the male bee in the colony. It develops from an unfertilized egg and therefore carries only a single set of chromosomes, so it has no father, but can become the father of the next bee generation.
The drone is the male bee in the colony. It develops from an unfertilized egg and therefore carries only a single set of chromosomes, so it has no father, but can become the father of the next bee generation. Drones have no stinger and no pollen-collecting apparatus on their hind legs. They bring in neither nectar nor pollen and are provisioned by the colony.
Development from egg to fully formed bee takes 24 days for the drone, longer than for the worker bee (21 days) and the queen (16 days). After hatching, it still takes about one to two weeks until it is sexually mature. Its task is to mate with young queens at drone congregation areas, ideally not from its own colony. Whichever drone succeeds dies during mating. If mating does not happen, a drone can live to be about 30 to 40 days old.
How many drones a colony keeps varies. Typical figures range from several hundred to around 1,000 individuals, and they are only found in the colony in spring and summer. Toward the end of the season, when the nectar flow and the breeding period come to an end, they are no longer fed and are driven out of the hive. This is called drone expulsion (drone slaughter). There is no fixed date for it; the timing depends on the course of the nectar flow and on the year.
Drones are often seen as freeloaders that only cost feed. For mating, however, they are indispensable, and in large numbers from many different colonies. Because a queen mates with several drones, the worker bees of a colony descend from several fathers. This genetic diversity within the colony is a biological advantage, not a coincidence.