Show Me the Honey

by Dave Doroghy

  On the female side, comparisons between bee mating and human dating rituals continue. Shortly after young women reach sexual maturity, many become interested in boys and hope to begin dating. This is when they pester their parents to allow them to fly the nest to go hang at the mall or go to “a friend’s house” (secret code for party). This dating interest also happens quickly for the queen bee, even more so as she hits sexual maturity seven days after being born. The virgin queen bee, like her human teenage counterparts, wants to hit the spots in town where she will find boys interested in meeting girls. When she is ready to go on the prowl, she leaves the safety of the colony and flies off for her big fling. Unlike younger teenage girls, who tend to huddle in giggly packs, queen bees fly solo.

  As with all successful dates, a bit of prep work is required for the queen to land those perfect partners. First impressions really do matter in the insect world. Before she goes on her lengthy mating flight, the young queen will have taken a few shorter flights to help her get in shape and strengthen her wings. Heading into a marathon airborne sex orgy, the last thing you want is weak wings that give out and ground you. Plus the exercise makes her svelte and more attractive. You get the picture: the queen bee is no different from many sexually active men and women who hit the gym to slim down, tone up, and increase their dateability. When the queen is fit enough, she considers how to make herself even more alluring in order to seduce the perfect drones. For colours, she usually sticks with the basics: yellow and brown. Then out comes that naughty, irresistible, seductive perfume pheromone. A sexually active queen bee naturally exudes this pheromone, powerfully broadcasting the fragrance from her mandibular gland. As the queen flies through the drone congregation area, she secretes her unique “come hither” pheromone guaranteed to attract and fire up all the drone bees she encounters, sending them into a sexual frenzy.

  Arriving at the drone party after a long, rigorous flight from her home hive, the debutante plays hard to get until the perfect strong, handsome drone shows up. She is looking for her very own stud, a boy bee with a certain buzz and flair and a big, muscular thorax—an enticing, skilful tiny dancer to push all the right buttons at 100 feet above sea level. When the perfect drone shows up, she flitters and flutters around for a very short time, erotically teasing him by winking one of her five eyes at him and sensually flicking her long, wet proboscis. The mood has to be just right with the sun high in the sky, romantic wisps of puffy white clouds far off in the distance, and the twittering sounds of robins and chickadees. At that perfect time the fastest drone catches her; he flies slightly above and behind her, grabbing her abdomen with his legs.

  That is the extent of bee foreplay, however. She quickly seduces the drone she desires, enticing him to insert his barbed endophallus penis into her bee “vagina” at the end of her abdomen. This, of course, is exactly what the horny drone has wanted to do, has been programmed to do, and was meant to do since the day he was born and crawled out of his tiny six-sided wax cell. As the 12 insect legs intertwine in mid-air, the drone, caught up in the moment, is so ecstatic he loses his mind. Overheated with lustful and unabashed insect desire pulsating through his tiny pelvis and into his detachable penis, the love-starved drone can’t control his deep-seated sexual instincts. All this love bug can think of is kinky mid-air intercourse with his beautiful mistress cloaked in risqué, soft, sweet fuzz and clouded in pheromone. Bees don’t speak words, of course, so one can only imagine what a drone would say during this intimate moment. Perhaps he’d utter her name, “Queenie,” or buzz a sweet nothing in her ear as the two become one, or maybe he would just groan, “Oh, honey.” Whatever he says, they would be his last words. The desire the drone gives into when he penetrates the queen is so strong, it overrides the fact that this copulation will immediately kill him.

  Caught up in high-altitude sexual acrobatics, the drone breathes in more and more of the virgin queen’s sweet pheromones. He becomes so aroused he can’t stop thrusting himself into her abdomen, finally climaxing so hard it makes an audible popping noise. You can actually hear the sound of a fatal bee orgasm! As the drone literally explodes in rapture, he falls to the ground to die. He dies because his endophallus (internal penis), which he has turned inside out to mate, is barbed for easy, rapid attachment, and as such it remains lodged in the queen’s abdomen, so the lower half of his guts get ripped off along with his tiny member—hence the pop. Sadly he dies knowing that although he may have been the first drone to mate with the queen that day, he won’t be the last. She will soon forget him and go on to have many other rapid-fire airborne lovers. The only reason she exists is to advance the ongoing circle of life in the hive and collect as much sperm that day as she can. Love ’em and leave ’em.

  But she can’t forget him that easily, as the penis he left in her has a smelly mucus coating known as a “mating sign.” That sticky aftermath is now all over her rear end. Other drones lured in to mate with the queen later that day will attempt to remove the first bee’s mating sign and replace it with their own. Bee sex is raw, messy, and not pretty to look at. As the queen continues putting notches on her bedpost, she gets covered with more smelly mating slime. The indiscreet dalliances continue over and over again, up to 20 times, until she is a slimeball of hormonal secretions. These smells, in addition to her own pheromones, only add to her desirability and allure. During this wild coming-out party, where smells and pheromones mean so much, she will continue to repeat the mid-air sex act with different drones all day before her deep-seated lust is satisfied.

  The annual sex blowout I just described is hardly ever seen by prudish and reserved earthbound mortals. It is unusual to see thousands of drones congregating and hovering while awaiting a queen. It is extremely rare to see a queen and a drone actually mating, or to hear the popping climax sound. I have never seen or heard it, and I don’t know anyone from our bee club who has, but I saw it once in a documentary film clip. It was in a trailer for a movie called More Than Honey. I must warn you that this particular clip is raw, unadulterated wild bee sex. It shows a queen bee embracing a drone in mid-air. Then, close up and in high-definition colour, bang! Pop goes the penis. It’s really fun, albeit a bit disturbing. The 10 seconds of extremely rare footage were caught by another kind of drone, the mechanical type attached to a camera. You gotta see it. If you have nothing to do tonight, google “queen bee’s wedding flight.” It’s total bug porn! But just watch it once. Like any porn, bug porn can be unhealthy and addictive.

  This goes on annually at drone congregation areas all over the world. The female sex bomb flies through the air, systematically sending lusty drones down to their graves while she fills up with their precious life-giving bug sperm. Picture this: as the satiated queen finally heads back to the hive, up to 20 drones will lie dead on the ground, each drone with a perverted smile frozen on his face and missing his puny penis. And those bees were the lucky ones. Every single drone at the congregation area will die anyway in the next few days. At least the lifeless ones on the ground were able to mate, have a second or two of pleasure, and die with purpose.

  As for the drones that didn’t get laid, well, it’s a cruel numbers game designed by Mother Nature—a lot like my odds at the discos in the ’70s. Only about 1 in 1,000 drones is successful in hooking up on the elevated dance floor. The vast majority of drones that don’t die mating the queen will later return to the hive, where they will be about as welcome as drunken sailors. If there was a shortage of nectar, they will not be allowed back into the hive and will starve to death. No big deal to the female bees, though—the hive will produce new drones the following spring and the cycle will continue.

  Here is where the narrative becomes scientific. Although the queen harvested over 6 million spermatozoa from all those rowdy drones, she doesn’t conceive on her mating flight, despite the high volume of penetration because she was not carrying millions of eggs with her at the time. She produces eggs in a separate place in her abdomen on an as-needed basis back at t
he ranch. Keep in mind this is her one big day out, and she needs to fill up with enough sperm to last her lifetime. She will never go out and mate again. She stores all that spunk so she can access the life-giving sperm upon returning to the hive, where she will produce eggs as per the needs of the hive in order to give birth, and give birth, and give birth, and give birth.

  This is all part of the bees’ circle of life to ensure healthy breeding and to allow the hive to thrive. The queen must continually replenish just the right mix of male drones and female worker bees, especially because they live for such short periods of time.

  In the 1960s, ultrasounds became available in North America to help parents determine the sex of their children, among other things. Once again, bees have beaten us to the punch. There is no guesswork in the hive. The queen determines the sex of every single future bee while she lays her eggs. To help her decide, she draws on the thousands of bees in the hive to advise her. Collectively they know the exact ratio of males to females from all the work they have been doing feeding, cleaning, and capping each cell. The proper mix of drones to females changes from year to year, depending on a variety of conditions, including the weather, the season, and the hive’s ever-changing flora surroundings. While the queen lays eggs, the workers dance and vibrate around her, communicating and consulting with her on whether to lay a boy egg or a girl egg.

  As the queen positions her bum in a cell to release an egg, she has two choices. She can drop an unfertilized egg that will become a male drone bee. Or she can add that sperm inside her body to a microscopic egg and create a fertilized egg that will become a female worker bee. It’s nothing short of amazing. She actually controls the sex of each egg she lays, depending on the size of the cell the egg goes into. She measures each cell with her tiny front legs before dropping a tiny egg into it. The big cells are designed for male drones; the smaller cell cribs have been built for the female worker babies—talk about planned parenthood.

  As beekeepers, we don’t need to wait the 21 days for a female worker bee to hatch or 24 days for a male drone bee to hatch to learn the sex of each bee. We can tell by pulling out the frames of comb and simply looking at the brood pattern of the six-sided cells. Eggs, or “brood,” as we call it, are laid in distinct patterns, textures, and locations, depending on the sex of the inhabitant of the egg. The queen will lay drone brood on the bottom of each wooden frame, whereas she lays the fertilized female eggs in the centre portion of the hive. The brood pattern for healthy female eggs is usually a big circle the size of a volleyball in the middle of the frame. Another clue is that the drone brood is always capped with a bumpy, crusty cap, elevated about a quarter of an inch above the cell. This is partly because the drone bees are slightly larger than the female workers and need a bit more room in the nursery. The rest of the female brood is capped with a totally flat surface, resulting in a smaller, cozier crib. So when you see a beekeeper lifting a frame of bees out of a box and studying the frame carefully, one of the things he or she is looking for is brood patterns.

  Last but not least, there is the “wild-card egg.” We know how male and female bees are made, but where does the queen—the super-female bee and source of all bee life—come from? Don’t say Buckingham Palace. The bees in the hive collectively know when their queen is running out of steam, and it’s time to make a new queen. Like Queen Elizabeth, queens in a hive will often outlive their subjects. As noted previously, a queen bee lives for three or four years, compared with worker bees, which live for only six weeks in the summer and up to six months in the winter. Eventually, even the queen bee will lay her last egg and die, and so, as with all things in a hive, a succession plan is already well in place. The worker bees sense that a new queen will soon be needed, and so they get busy building a special wax cell for a royal baby bee. Like a luxury condo, it’s huge. It’s called a queen cell or supersedure cell. They are about the size of your pinky finger and hang down from the face of the cone or the bottom edge, looking totally different from the standard six-sided cells.

  Then the worker bees start feeding the larva in the queen cell a special diet that actually changes the developing bee fetus’s molecular structure. They feed it something called royal jelly. No, royal jelly is not what Elizabeth and Philip slather on their toast every morning. It’s a special secretion that oozes out of the tiny glands of nurse bees. The worker bees actually feed microscopic amounts of royal jelly to all of the larvae in the colony, regardless of their sex or caste. When the worker bees decide it is time to crown a new queen, they feed copious amounts of royal jelly to the little white larva curled up in the fetal position in the queen cell. This supercharged diet triggers a different type of development: the tiny cells morph into a larger queen with the fully developed ovaries needed to lay eggs.

  There is one more important step in the birth and emergence of a new queen. Usually the worker bees, sensing a new queen is required, will build several queen cells and feed them all the supercharged royal jelly. This is their way of increasing the odds of producing at least one healthy, fertile queen. After a few weeks, six or seven queens may be produced in a single hive. But make no mistake about it: all hives have only one queen to rule in the end. The newborn queen bee, if she is first to hatch out of her cell, will go over to the other queen cells and kill the developing queens inside. If two or more queen bees hatch at the same time, they will ruthlessly battle it out to determine which one will take the throne. In a cutthroat, winner-take-all fight to the death, only one queen is left standing. It’s truly survival of the fittest. After the fighting comes the loving: in 7 to 10 days, the new Queenie goes out for her flight of delight. There you have it—the sexy, messy, and semi-macabre tale of bee dating, mating, and birthing. It’s all carefully orchestrated by that sometimes sweet, sometimes cruel, ultimate queen of queens: Mother Nature.

  Reflecting on the whole bee propagation process, I can’t help but contrast it to my younger, exciting disco days and my modest share of mating flings. Thinking of the tragic fate of the drones, however, I am so glad that my penis is not detachable and barbed. I am still here, with honey in my cupboard and admiration for my bees. Every morning I marvel at the miracle of life and positive energy in the hive. It makes me happy. Eat your heart out, Hugh Hefner.

  Old Man Winter

  Once spring and summer’s virility has passed and autumn’s colourful glory has faded, the harsh Canadian winter on the Fraser River presents significant problems for both man and bug. Bitter, icy northern cold fronts will not only challenge a colony of bees cooped up in a small wooden box on an exposed deck for five freezing months, but also test the mettle of a balding bachelor beekeeper hunkered down inside an old wooden barge.

  When Old Man Winter arrives, no matter how high I turn up the electric thermostat for my old baseboard heaters, no matter how much firewood I feed my trusty claw-footed cast-iron wood stove, and no matter how many thick grey wool sweaters I layer atop one another, I still can’t stop shivering in the humid float home when the mercury plummets and the cold winds blow. During my second winter with the bees, the temperature certainly dived well below freezing on three separate occasions. Each cold snap lasted over a week and turned the usually pleasant, cozy houseboat into a Siberian prison.

  It is rare for the Fraser River to freeze, but when it does it is very pretty, especially when a thin layer of fresh snow sparkles on the smooth, flawless ice. The frozen river is as beautiful as it is impractical. A hose, not a lot different from the garden hose you use to sprinkle your lawn, supplies my float home with water. The hose runs from the dock behind me into the river and then resurfaces near the front of the hull, where it is plumbed in above the waterline. When the river freezes, the hose freezes. When the hose freezes, I have no water. All living creatures, including bachelors and bees, need water to survive.

  So how do the bees hydrate and get their daily water when the great Canadian outdoors is the same temperature as the inside of your deep freezer? It has to do with the wat
er content of the honey inside the hive, because honey is actually a supersaturated sugar solution. Mother Nature is amazing and always prepared for the changing seasons. One of the reasons the bees reduce the honey’s water content by flapping their wings to aerate it in the summer is to prepare the honey not to freeze in the winter. The coveted 18.6 percent water content of honey is a level where there are more dissolved solids than are usually found in any liquid. Just think—honey is delicious, it’s nutritious, and it’s antifreeze.

  In winter when the water in my pipes freezes, I must go to the grocery store for bottled water to survive. As usual, when it come to survival, my bees are smarter and several steps ahead of me. Since they figured out how to properly prepare their honey for sub-zero temperatures millions of years ago, they can just stay right at home. However, I do need to take a little credit for their winter wellness. I carry out key winterizing tasks to help my girls “make it through December,” to quote Merle Haggard in one of his greatest country tunes.