Day #411 Drones Don't Have Daddies

Isn’t there a Grandparents’ Day coming up soon? If so, drones (the male honey bees) will probably be delighted to celebrate it. After all, each drone has a grandfather.

But Father’s Day? Drones don’t have a dad to send a card to or buy a tie for.

How is this possible? I’m glad you asked.

I went to the Honey Bee Research & Extension Lab website so I’d be sure the answer was scientifically valid. Here’s what Ed Beary wrote:

The queen and workers are female bees with a diploid set of chromosomes. The drones are male with a haploid set of chromosomes. To get a worker, the queen must add sperm to the egg. There must be a male to provide that sperm. To get a male, she does nothing but deposit the egg in a cell. No sperm in needed from a male bee.

Maybe this is why drones are so relatively unproductive around the hive. They don’t have a daddy to show them what work is supposed to be like.

Drones fulfill only three functions, as far as we people know. They

1.       Grow up in a big drone cell that’s been built around the outside edge of the hive so that if a bear tears open the hive, the bear is more likely to eat drone cells than to get to destroy the center of the hive,

2.      Protect the queen on her mating flight by surrounding her and serving a bait for marauding birds, and finally,

3.      Mate with one queen (not necessarily the one from their own hive), and then they die.

If those are their only reasons for living, I’m not sure a daddy would help.

BEEattitude for Day # 411:

       Blessed are those who know what they want to do when they grow up, for they shall get a head start on the rest of us.
 
p.s. from Fran: the book signing at Wellspring Treasures in Kennesaw was great fun. We sold lots of books, and I got to talk with some great folks I never would have met otherwise.

______________________________ 

The teeny details:
BOOK SIGNINGS
     Dec.   3       1-3 p.m.         Books for Less, Buford GA
     Dec.   4       1-3 p.m.         Humpus Bumpus Bookstore, Cumming GA
     Dec. 10       2-4 p.m.         Peerless Bookstore, Alpharetta GA     

my books:  http://www.franstewart.com Please buy them from an independent bookstore or directly from my website.

my eBooks for Kindle:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006AA0I4M

Day #51 Drone Facts and Philosophy

1. Adult drones, unlike worker bees, have no stingers, so drones can't sting. Worker bees, with their barbed stingers, die when they sting someone or something. But drones are so fat and sassy they don't need to sting anyone. Their danger zone comes about when an unmated queen flies up to a drone gathering. She'll mate with 20 or 30 drones -- and the poor guys literally explode at the end of the mating process.

          It's never failed yet: whenever a man hears that fact, his comment (following a chuckle) is always, "Well, at least they die happy."

2. In a natural bee hive, drone cells (the ones that are larger than worker cells) are grouped around the bottom and sides of the hive frame. When a queen is ready to lay an egg in a large cell like that, she chooses a non-fertile egg. Yes, she can tell the difference. That non-fertile egg grows into a drone. The eggs for the worker bees are laid in a spiral pattern starting near the center of the frame. Some beekeepers think the bees waste too much energy creating all those drone cells and drone larvae, and some go so far as to cutt off the drone cells. But, guess what? The workers will just build more drone cells. Why?

      Well, I've read that if a predator breaks into a hive, it will generally start eating the comb at the edges. Voila! The drones are there to serve as sacrificial hive-savers so the worker larvae are more likely to survive.

3. Drones in the late fall are a sorry lot. You see, each drone eats an inordinate amount of honey, and a hive couldn't survive the winter with the non-productive fellas eating up their food stores, So, as the weather turns colder, the workers force the drones out of the hive and dump the drone brood (the unhatched baby drones) out the front door. And I thought A Slaying Song Tonight was gruesome! It's nothing compared to this mass murder.

4. The good news is that as winter comes to a close, the queen begins laying eggs for both workers and drones that will mature shortly before the new workers are needed for the upcoming spring nectar and pollen. The drones that emerge get to eat a lot and go flying around, where they gather with other drones and buzz-buzz-buzz about guy things, until along flies a brand new queen. And then . . .well, they die happy.

BEEattitude for Day # :

       Blessed are the drones, for they shall contribute to the survival of the hive. 

One thing Fran is grateful for right now:

       The rain that is filling the pond near the corner of GA-20 and Old Peachtree Road. 

Day #44 Reaching Across the World

On Tuesday, I mailed some of my books to two people I'd met through the internet. One is working on her Doctor of Divinity degree; we correspond through emails and Skype. I may be editing her work, but I'm also learning a lot from her.

Another is a science writer who works for NASA. I subscribe to NASA Science News, and I kept noticing her name listed as the author of articles I truly enjoyed reading. Finally one day, after reading her explanation of "Curiosity" (a space exploration vehicle trudging over the dusty Mars landscape),  I clicked on her name. Ah-ha! A link to her email. So I wrote her a quick note about how much I had enjoyed that particular article. She manages to get wry humor into most of her articles. In this one, she'd said that exploring Mars was much like finding your grandmother's dusty journal in an attic. Of course you'd read it! And you'd find out that "Granny was a pistol."

Here's what I said to her in my first email after I introduced myself briefly:

           I am so impressed when I read a scientific article that is as lucid as yours was. Your image of exploring grandmother's dusty diary was truly brilliant.  The "bird-dog" simile was equally effective. Thank you for your meticulous detail and your fine writing. You're going on my gratitude list tonight because of the joy I felt reading about "Curiosity."

          Best wishes,

                  --Fran

 p.s. I have read my grandmother's diaries -- and she WAS a pistol!

She replied and, over the past year we've kept up quite a conversation. She finally got around to reading my first mystery, and then asked me to send her another one. The same thing happened with the doctoral candidate in Australia, who is working her way through every one of my books.

Well then, where do bees come into all this? Think about the folks who emigrated to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries. I'd be willing to bet some of them were beekeepers. The sailing ships then were rather like the internet now. They carried letters (emails). They allowed forays into new realms (like internet searches). The beekeepers, finding bees in the Americas, would have recognized them and their value, much the same way I recognized value in the NASA article and the dissertation.

Queen bees, on their maiden flight, during which they go to where the drones gather (a new territory indeed for the young queens) and mate with a large number of drones from differing bees hives (colonies). They bring the resulting genetic variety back to their hive in the same way that ideas from the New World mingled with ideas from the Old.

So - pull out your granny's old diary. You never know what you'll find. Maybe she kept bees.

BEEattitude for Day # 44:

       Blessed are those who explore new worlds, for they shall find nectar in abundance. 

One thing Fran is grateful for right now:

       My connections with Mesheril and Dauna