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How do bees have sex? Is it in mid-flight? Does the male die?

When one queen survives in a colony, she will fly out on a sunny, warm day to a "drone congregation area" where she will mate with 12-15 drones. If the weather holds, she may return to the drone congregation area for several days until she is fully mated. The young queen stores the sperm in her spermatheca. She will selectively release sperm from that one mating flight for the remaining 2-7 years of her life.

The young queen has only a limited time to mate. If she is unable to fly for several days because of bad weather and remains unmated, she will become a "drone layer." Drone-laying queens usually mean the death of the colony, because the workers have no fertilized (female) larvae from which to raise a replacement.

A special, rare case of reproduction is thelytoky: the reproduction of female workers or queens by laying worker bees. Thelytoky occurs in the Cape bee, Apis mellifera capensis, and has been found in other strains at very low frequency.

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Thank you for the quick reply. Most interesting. Something I did not know and learnt again.

I have read that the Kruger scientists are a bit concerned about the "Exotic bee mite" that was found in 2000 in Kruger.
According to them its appearance may have a big impact on Kruger's plant life.

Are the Bee population shrinking?

Anyone with some more updated info?

pieter22, don't know about the bee mite. Maybe another forumite does?

However, when searching for bee information, I did come across two interesting articles:

Honeybees Cybertracked!

Insects getting more attention in Kruger

The first article talks about disease threats to bees, and the use of Cybertracker to gather data on bee colonies.

Good reply DuQues! I'm a beekeeper in the uk. The mite found in 2000 was probably Varroa which is causing havoc in bee stocks world wide.It carries a number of virus's and may be the cause of colony collapse disorder.

If I wanted to attract bees to the garden, what would give best results ? Not just the occasional bee...

Bees have their own shopping baskets - pollen baskets. This was interesting to spot this on a few bees busy feasting on an aloe.

Great photo!

Thanks