#bee facts

You have a spenderiffic taste in insects, my friend!!!

Did you know that scientists know exactly how bees fly?

They actually just beat their wings in a figure eight motion, which creates tiny little pockets of low air pressure above the wings as the wings displace the air.

They also reach an impressive 220 to 250 wing beats per second!

When I coded them, I decided to leave out all the neat physics, since if I tried to incorporate it, it would be horrible for optimization.

Remember that bees are incredibly important to the ecosystem because they are excellent pollinators. According to bee experts, a third of the world’s food production depends on bees.

Save the bees 🐝 Plant more trees 🌲 Clean the seas 🐋

“OK! DID YOU KNOW THAT BEES HAVE FIVE EYES?! AND THAT THEY HAVE SUCH A GOOD SENSE OF SMELL, EVEN BETTER THEN A DOGS SENSE OF SMELL?!”

YAYYYYY OK SO

so drone bees are my favorite loser guys ever first and foremost they have half the DNA of a worker. All drones are males and all workers are females, so when the queen goes around laying eggs she can choose to fertilize it or not and that will determine if it’s male or female (drone or worker) so drones literally have half as many chromosomes as the workers and their family tree is soooo fucked but I’ll get to that in a bit

Workers have stingers but drones don’t (one time I was playing with a drone in my hands bc he couldn’t sting me and when I went to put him near the hive, a worker got pissed and got in my hair and stung me behind the ear bc I wasn’t wearing my gear lol), literally a drones only purpose is to mate. They dont pollinate or take care of the hive they just live off the work of the worker bees and wait to fuck which is sooooo funny to me. Every now and then, the drones go on a mating flight and somehow meet another queen midair (idk if we even know how they know where to go… probably pheromones or something) and their ONE GOAL is to mate. And after they mate (dare I say this is the best part) their reproductive organs rip off and fucking kill them, kinda how like if a worker stings you their stinger comes off and they die.

another fun fact is that the sperm the queen collects is enough to last her for the rest of her life (up to 5 ish years) and it doesn’t mix! So they’re kinda like sperm packets she got from different drones and you can tell when she switches because your bees might start being a different color or temperament

“But what if the drones don’t mate?” I hear you ask. Excellent question! If they don’t mate and they just stay in the hive, they get kicked out when fall/winter comes bc they don’t contribute! So basically, their entire life goal is to be half the bee a worker is, fuck and then die, and if they don’t get laid they basically live in their moms basement until they get kicked out bc they’re freeloaders and die :)))

before we get into their fucked family tree I need to yap a bit about how queens are made. Workers will decide they need a queen for a multitude of reasons so they will make a deeper cell (called a swarm cell) and the queen will lay her egg and fertilize it (bc only fertilized eggs will be female) and then the workers will feed the larvae royal jelly. Every bee gets a little royal jelly but they’ll give the new queen a lot more. Another fun fact is that if there’s multiple swarm cells, the first queen to emerge will go kill all the others before they hatch or the queens will fight to the death

Nowwww their family tree: a female needs to be fertilized so you need a female and a male to make a queen, but a drone only needs a female so that ends up with their tree looking like this:

What the hell am I right??? Also I took a genetics class that was so interesting so I wanna research more about how bee chromosomes really work other than just drones having half as many but idk much about that rn. Here’s a picture showing how drones literally just have half the chromosomes of a female:

That’s mostly just what I know about drone honey bees, there’s also tons of other bees that I know less about especially in Colorado where I am (like there’s this one called a mason bee that literally makes their house out of stone, there’s tons of solitary bees that I don’t know as much about) and I know a bit more than I shared about workers and queens as well as the roll of bees in the environment (like in my AP environmental science class, we learned about beehives being used as integrated pest management in Africa to deter elephants from ruining crops which is SO COOL) but this is already pretty long and is supposed to be just on drones lol

hello!!

yess bee facts!! i love bee facts!!

even though im not a bumblebee, i absolutely adore them!! honeybees shiver as well, though not quite in the same way as i understand it