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Drone bee. A drone is a male bee. Unlike the female worker bee, a drone has no stinger. He does not gather nectar or pollen and cannot feed without assistance from worker bees. His only role is to mate with a maiden queen in nuptial flight.
The term "queen bee" can be more generally applied to any dominant reproductive female in a colony of a eusocial bee species other than honey bees. However, as in the Brazilian stingless bee (Schwarziana quadripunctata), a single nest may have multiple queens or even dwarf queens, ready to replace a dominant queen in case of a sudden death. [2]
Pheromones also play a role in coalescing drones to the exact location of the queen. The International Bee Research Association's standard procedure for locating drone congregation areas involves using a queen or a (pheromone-marked) dummy queen to attract drones from the diffuse cluster of a typical drone congregation area into a visible clump ...
Workers are nevertheless considered female for anatomical and genetic reasons. Genetically, a worker bee does not differ from a queen bee and can even become a laying worker bee, but in most species will produce only male (drone) offspring. Whether a larva becomes a worker or a queen depends on the kind of food it is given after the first three ...
Unlike a bumble bee colony or a paper wasp colony, the life of a honey bee colony is perennial. The three types of honey bees in a hive are: queens (egg-producers), workers (non-reproducing females), and drones (males whose main duty is to find and mate with a queen). Unlike the worker bees, drones do not sting.
The colony of Apis cerana, a typical honey bee, consists of several thousand female worker bees, one queen bee, and several hundred male drone bees. The colony is constructed inside beeswax combs inside a tree cavity, with a special peanut-shaped structure on the margins of the combs where the queens are reared.
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A mating yard is a term for an apiary which consists primarily of queen mating nucs and hives which raise drones. [1] [2] A queen bee must mate in order to lay fertilized eggs, which develop into workers and other queens, which are both female. Queens can lay eggs parthenogenetically, but these will always develop into drones (males).