Why do male bees mate with female bees despite knowing it will lead to certain death? They are not afraid of dying. It takes venom from approximately 1,100 stings to kill a human. To collect about 1 kilogram of honey, 1,100 bees need to fly around 90,000 miles, which is roughly three times the distance of the moon’s orbit! In terms of flowers, it takes touching the pollen of around 4 million flowers to gather 1 kilogram of honey. In a good season, if everything goes well, about 55 kilograms of honey can be stored. From these facts, we can understand how hardworking worker bees are.
On the other hand, the queen bee only eats and lays eggs! The queen lays between 1,500 and 2,500 eggs per day. The behavior of male bees is quite peculiar. They never do any work in their lives; even the worker bees have to feed them. Their sole purpose in life is to mate with the queen bee!
During the mating season, every afternoon, the most capable male bees gather at a specific place called the drone congregation area. At the same time, the queen bee leaves the hive for a flight called the “mating flight.” The queen bee suddenly enters the drone congregation area and releases a special scent, which excites hundreds of male bees. The queen bee then mates with a male bee of her choice while flying. The queen can consecutively mate with 18-20 male bees!
The strange thing is, during mating, the male bee’s endophallus or sexual organ breaks off, causing the male bee to die instantly. This is why this mating is referred to as “the dramatic sexual suicide.” A beehive contains only one queen bee. The hive revolves around her.
If a female bee is born from an egg, the worker bees hide the young female bee to keep her out of the queen’s sight. If the queen notices the young female bee, it will be killed. When the young queen bee grows up, there are two possibilities: either a battle ensues between the two queens, resulting in one killing the other to take control of the hive, or they separate to establish two different hives.
If a queen bee dies unexpectedly, all the worker bees will know within 15 minutes and will collectively initiate the process of creating a new queen bee.
There are more fascinating facts that will surely amaze you: to produce 500 grams of honey, 2 million flowers are needed. A worker bee can produce only half a teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime. Another interesting fact is that honey is the only food in the world that never spoils!
© Mukto Samadder
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