Male bees are called drones, and only a small number of them exist in the typical colony at any one time. A drone develops from an unfertilized egg laid by the queen, so it can be said that he has no father, although he does have a grandfather on his mother's side. He is almost twice as large as his sisters, but he is not physically equipped to collect pollen or nectar, and he cannot help defend the hive because, being male, he has no sting (the sting is part of the female's egg-laying organ, the ovipositor).
The only role played by a drone occurs outside the nest. During a queen's first few days of life, she mates with several drones that find her while flying. Other than his role in this important process, he has no function in the colony and simply rests, grooms himself, and begs other bees for food. To help him locate a virgin queen with whom to mate, a drone's compound eyes are much larger than the same structures on female workers (so large that they touch on the top of his head).
In addition he is equipped with antennae that are particularly sensitive to queen pheromone. If a drone has not successfully mated after a week or so of trying, the workers will withhold food and he will weaken and die, or he will be driven out of the hive and killed because he is a drain on the group's reserves. The reality is that most drones die before getting a chance to mate. Unless a colony is preparing to swarm or has recently swarmed, it is relatively rare to find drones in the nest.
The queen is of great importance to the colony because she controls and regulates reproduction. When a new queen is needed, a larva from a worker egg is fed exclusively on royal jelly for her first four days of life.The workers deposit a flood of royal jelly into the larval queen's cell, and she eats more or less constantly. This special diet triggers the queen's body to grow quite large and her reproductive system to fully develop, but her brain is smaller than the brain of a worker bee.
Once the adult queen has emerged from her cell, she goes on a series of mating flights over the course of a few days, and then for the rest of her life stays in the colony, laying eggs and regulating much of the activity of the hive by releasing chemical bouquets or pheromones. She is always surrounded by attendants who feed her, stroke her, carry away her waste, and guide her to empty brood combs where she lays an egg in each cell.
Honey bees are haplodiploid, which means that if they mate, the offspring from the fertilized egg will be female, but they are also capable of parthenogenic or unmated reproduction, which results in male offspring that have only half the usual number of chromosomes (haploid). The queen lays fertilized eggs in most cells, and they develop into female workers; but occasionally her attendants will take her to a larger cell, which will stimulate her to lay an unfertilized egg that will develop into a male.
Although in most species workers do not reproduce, the reproductive habits of Cape honey bee workers, a southern South African subspecies of the Western honey bee, have been recently studied with surprising results. Unmated Cape bee workers are uniquely able to lay diploid eggs by means of parthenogenisis, whereas unmated females of other honey bee species are only able to lay haploid eggs.
Females of this species have been found by Michael Lattorff and colleagues at Martin Luther University in Germany to have the capacity to develop into "pseudoqueens," which he defines as workers with queen-like physiology and behavior. Using genetic analysis, the Australian researcher Lyndon Jordan and his colleagues found that twenty-three out of thirty-nine new queens produced by seven colonies of Cape honey bees that they studied were offspring of workers rather than of the colony's queen, and only eight of the new queens were from eggs laid by workers from the same colony.
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