The queen’s notoriety
If I had to be a bee, I would want to be the queen. She’s perceived as being the hive’s boss. She’s catered to, she’s defended, she’s indispensable to the hive’s wellbeing, and due to her uniqueness, I suspect she’s overrated.
Every queen’s life has a jaded genesis. Her first official instinctual function is to kill her rival sisters before they kill her — hardly a family bonding behavior. Her sterile sisters (workers), which may be her half-sisters, full sisters, or super sisters, seemingly take no interest in the rivalry. The stakes are high. Either she lives or she dies. The driving force behind this unique bonding behavior is that the colony ultimately has only one queen. I’m not qualified to explain why that is, it just is.
Since fighting for her life must be a tiresome process, the victorious queen takes a short break of about a week before she begins the second phase of her existence — mating. The short version of the long colorful story is that the queen takes nuptial flights, with the sole intention of making as many drone/male friends as quickly as possible. These flights are a dangerous part of the queen’s life. She must predict weather, not get lost (her aerial trysts may require her to fly several miles from her hive), and she must be able to dodge birds and Chevrolets. To be able to conceive sexually sterile offspring that we have labeled “workers” (and that we call “honey bees” when we see them on flowers), the queen must obviously unionize with at least one drone. However, a typical queen will probably develop relationships with as many as 18 drones.
Drone congregation areas (DCAs)
The way that vestal queens have developed to meet new male friends is a story that seems to be the fodder of tall tales. Most people who have any inkling of honey bee queen-mating biology envision the queen hastily departing from the colony with a cone-shaped entourage of sex-starved drones in hot pursuit. The “fittest” drone supposedly catches the queen and an apicultural moment occurs.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. If that were the case, honey bee queens would consistently mate with males with which they were too closely related. Too many harmful genetic characteristics would be expressed in this hypothetical bee population. Ultimately, it would just genetically “go away” — or die out. To prevent such harsh backcrossing from occurring, colonies from a community contribute drones to an aerial mixing pot called drone congregation areas (DCAs). DCAs are the genetic mixing pools of the sky. Drones from a host of colonies go to those areas from about 10:00 a.m. until about 3:00 p.m. and “hang out,” at about 35 feet from the ground, waiting for the queen to come by. DCA size and population vary according to the season and the number of colonies in the area. In most areas, in late summer there are many DCAs and the drone population in each would probably number in the thousands. Queens mating in early spring would probably have to take more flights than a queen would have to take in late summer. Queens seem to find the DCAs by smell (or other types of pheromones), but science has not conclusively shown that …
