Are these bees mating?
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Not sure, but did you know that technically drones are all female? I always thought they where male. There's an apiary on the small holding where my plot is. I should be going up today so I'll ask for you.
robin wood
Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
I am no expert though used to keep bees and have always had a bit of an interest in wild bees. This page is good for IDs and learning all about bumbles http://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/bumblebees_id.htm and these look to me like mating carder bees.
Carder bee Bombus pascuorum apparently is the most common all brown bee. Males have longer more gently curved antennae females have a notable kink in theirs, this ties nicely with your pics.
A google image search for mating Bombus pascuorum showed this one which looks a good match.
Carder bee Bombus pascuorum apparently is the most common all brown bee. Males have longer more gently curved antennae females have a notable kink in theirs, this ties nicely with your pics.
A google image search for mating Bombus pascuorum showed this one which looks a good match.
You were right first time. Drones are male. All the workers in a colony are female. I thought that in honey bees at least, the queens mated on the wing but possibly the size of bumble bees may make this unworkable. I know I am correct about the drones though as I keep bees and spend time checking through hives. Drones come from an unfertilized egg and workers and queens from fertilized eggs. The only difference between queens and workers is their diet while in the larval stage.
robin wood
Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
This is correct, the queen flies very high pursued by all the neighborhood drones, the ones that fly the highest get the dubious pleasure of mating with her and passing on their genes. Dubious pleasure since if I remember correctly during the process she rips out their genitalia and stores the semen in her abdomen. She will do this to several drones storing enough semen to last her several years of laying and fertilising without leaving the hive.
Nature is an amazing force. The queen stores the sperm from the drones that she mates with in her body and can decide whether or not to fertilize each egg as she lays it based on the size of the cell in the comb (drone cells are bigger). Thus the drones carry only the queens genes but the workers carry both the queen's and those of the drone whose sperm were used.
The queen produces a substance which is passed from bee to bee round the colony which has several functions (almost certainly including a lot that we don't know about yet). One effect of it though is to suppress the ovaries of all the female workers. If the colony is without a queen for a period of time for some reason this substance is missing and you can find several of the workers will start laying. However because they have never mated all their eggs develop into drones. Since drones can't forage (or do much at all for themselves really) and their only role in life is to mate, this laying by the workers cannot prevent the decline of the colony but does give it a chance to pass on it's genetics.
The queen produces a substance which is passed from bee to bee round the colony which has several functions (almost certainly including a lot that we don't know about yet). One effect of it though is to suppress the ovaries of all the female workers. If the colony is without a queen for a period of time for some reason this substance is missing and you can find several of the workers will start laying. However because they have never mated all their eggs develop into drones. Since drones can't forage (or do much at all for themselves really) and their only role in life is to mate, this laying by the workers cannot prevent the decline of the colony but does give it a chance to pass on it's genetics.
Fascinating. But I didn't ask how does she lay an egg without fertilizing it; even chickens can do that. For that matter so do human females. They don't actually lay an egg but they do ovulate without fertilization. My question was based on the basic biological principle that no egg splits and matures without fertilization. How do bees get around this basic biological law?
robin wood
Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
They do it so perhaps it aint a basic biological law, or perhaps we should say there are always exceptions. In this case the drones only have half the chromosomes a complex reproductive system which is explained here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
