Bees have quite the reputation for being hardworking. What you might not realise is that, like any household, some members of the hive are doing much more than others. In short, not every bee is busy.

Male honeybees, called drones, don’t have the body parts needed to collect pollen or nectar for the colony. They don’t have stingers, so they can’t even defend the hive. The only contribution the drones can make is to help with temperature control, flapping their wings to help cool the hive if it gets too hot. Officially, their main function is to hang around to mate with other queen bees. To fulfil their life goal, they linger in her flight path, hoping to be one of the few lucky guys (usually, the queen will mate with 10 to 20 drones on a mating flight).

‘Lucky’ is a subjective term here, because if the queen does mate with a drone he will rapidly die, as his penis and abdomen are ripped out during intercourse, left inside the queen. Apparently, this increases the drone’s chances of mating success. Approaching winter, female worker bees start blocking drones from food supplies. After all, they are now useless and draining resources. Any male bees that escape death by mating instead die of starvation as temperatures fall.

The male honeybees do not have many job opportunities in their life. Still, they provide the genetic diversity honeybees need! All for the colony!