The Healthy Honeybee

It looks like my queens have decided to grow some drones. See the capped cells that bulge out? Those will be male bees. The queen makes the decision to lay a male or female, usually based on the diameter of the cell. Once she's made her decision, she makes it happen by either fertilizing the egg for a female bee, or leaving the egg unfertilized for a male bee. She can do this because she has a special sac inside her for storing the sperm. For each egg laid, she first measures the cell with her antennae, then turns around and backs up into the cell to lay the egg at the very bottom. Drone larvae are bigger than worker larvae, so the workers extend the comb around them to cap them in at the appropriate time.

When a drone is ready to come out, he will make a sort of buzzing noise inside the cell, and one of his sisters will come and rescue him. The males are unable to chew their way out, so the female workers come and chew the cap off. Then the drones are free to run and play while the females clean up the mess.

Yes, the females do all the work. Drones don't really do much other than mate with a virgin queen. But come fall, when the female workers are getting ready to shut everything down for the winter, they will kick their brothers out of the home and let them die out in the freezing cold.
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