This page will show photos of the Drone honey bee, describing its anatomy and its duties within the hive and to the Queen bee.
Description
The drone Honey Bee is a male and is larger in body size.
Duties
His primary role is to mate with other colony queen bees.
He has to be strong and fast to win the fight of the other drone rival bees to mate with the queen bee when she is in flight and out of the hive.
Eye site.
He requires fantastic eye site. The Drone has large eyes and meet in the middle of its head taking up most of the space.
This allows him to spot the queen far away, which is always surrounded by her bees.
Flying skills.
They have much larger wings that cover the entire body, this gives them the powerful flying abilities.
Drones do not posses a sting.
He has a squarer looking body and is about the same weight of a queen bee.
His reward is a few seconds to mate with the queen bee. After which he falls to the ground and dies.
Work in the hive.
His only job in hive is to maintain the temperature of the hive.
The same as a normal worker bee the drone shivers to provide heat to warm up the hive, or beat its wings to cool the hive down.
Drone bee takes longer to gestate, as they do not get the privileges of plenty of food as a normal larvae or small bee would get.
They are larger so they will take longer than a normal bee to gestate, which is 24 days.
The duties of a honey drone bee.
More close ups of the drone body view here.
Very interesting one, A Drone Bees life cycle
Save all the bees
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