Understanding the role of the Drone in the Hive
The drone is the only male bee in the colony. Drones make up a relatively small percentage of the hive’s total population. At the peak of the season, their numbers may be in the hundreds. You rarely find more than a thousand.
Procreation is the drone’s primary purpose in life. Despite their high maintenance (they must be fed and cared for by the worker bees), drones are tolerated and allowed to remain in the hive because they may be needed to mate with a new virgin queen (when the old queen dies or needs to be superseded).
Bee mating occurs outside of the hive in mid-flight, 200 to 300 feet in the air. This location is known as the “drone Mating Area”, and it can be a mile or more away from the hive. The drone’s big eyes come in handy for spotting virgin queens taking their nuptial flights.
The few drones that do get a chance to mate are in for a sobering surprise. They die after mating!
That’s because their sex organ is barbed (like the worker bee’s stinger). An organ inside the queen called the “spermatheca” is the receptacle for the sperm. The queen will mate with several drones during her nuptial flight. After mating with the queen, the drone’s most personal apparatus and a significant part of its internal anatomy is torn away, and it falls to its death.
Once the weather gets cooler and the mating season comes to a close, the workers will not tolerate having drones around. After all, those fellows have big appetites and would consume a tremendous amount of food during the perilous winter months.
So in cooler climates at the end of the nectar-producing season, you will see the worker bees systematically expelling the drones from the hive. They are literally tossed out the door after the worker bees bite off their wings, they do this to prevent the drone trying to get back into the hive.
This is the beekeepers signal that the beekeeping season is over for the year and time to fit a mouse gaurd over the entrance to the hive. A mouse gaurd is a flat piece of metal with a few holes drilled in it, just big enough to allow the bees the come and go, this stops any mice from entering the hive where it's nice and warm for the winter.
The bees will most likely kill the mouse but by this time it will have done a lot of damage to the wax foundation and will have ate a lot of honey.
