Tracked male honeybees for two years to find out where they look for sex
We tracked male honeybees for two years to find out where they look for sex Honeybees pollinate a lot of our food crops, they’re welcome visitors to our gardens and they are widely kept throughout the world – so much so that some have described them as a domesticated species. It may come as a bit of a surprise, then, to discover there are big gaps in our knowledge regarding where honeybees mate. The problem is that bees mate in mid-air, possibly up to 50 metres above the ground, where it’s almost impossible to observe them. This is why my colleagues and I spent two years trying to track the flight paths of male honeybees, known as drones. We’ve published the results in a new study which helps solve the longstanding mystery of where honeybees mate. Drones are born in summer and have one aim in life – to mate with a virgin queen. New queens make up to six nuptial flights at the start of their lives, during which they mate with six to 24 different drones. They store the sperm,