Honeybee drones revalued

Naturwissenschaften, Volume 97, Number 3 (March, 2010) has an interesting article about honeybee drones. For decades, if not centuries, the prevailing wisdom about drone bees was that they contribute nothing to the welfare of the hive, aside from mating with virgin queens — a bit of Industrial Revolution nonsense owing more to Calvinist fables about sloth and hedonism than to any actual observation of honeybees. Old ways die hard.

Any honest Darwinian will realize immediately that drone bees are the vectors which sift the honeybee genome through the green strictures of local ecology. Queens, who are themselves exposed but for less time (on a single mating flight) to the same harsh local ecology as the drones, gain the experience and genetic contribution of male bees, whether from their own or nearby hives, which have survived an entire golden summer in what John Calvin would have been very pleased with himself to call a fool's paradise. Nothing of the sort.

Nor are drowsy, buzzy summer days a worker's paradise. Worker bees are even more vulnerable to their local ecosystems than drones or queens but their experience doesn't count. There's a catch; workers do not share their genes. Mutable or not, mutated or not, worker bees have no stake in the genetic future of their hive. Even worse, their queens are sequestered and never see the sun unless mating or swarming. The hive's only direct contact with its local environment, in any way that would allow it to adapt to local conditions, is through its drones.^†

This explains why artificial insemination of honey bee queens grown in the deep South, from similarly-bred CSA* drones never exposed to, and completely inexperienced with, the harsh winters of Wisconsin, the fungal environs of New Jersey, the new Florida of climate change or the microfauna of Story County, Iowa, is such a pestilential notion.

Like robot war and nuclear arsenals, such grand leaps to the frontiers of the possible as artificial insemination, which only seems comic in honeybees until you realize that pollination services by fewer than 500 artificial clades of industrial honeybees create many billions of dollars in agricultural wealth annually, overlooks a devilish lot of nasty consequence — perhaps including CCD (colony collapse disorder). Not everything that can be done should be done. But studying drones (see the Naturwissenschaften article, above) is one of those things that need doing.

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^†Kind of a crude overstatement, really. Worker bees carry most bee pests into the hive, including residual broad-spectrum pesticides and herbicides, microfauna, bacteria, fungi, respiratory parasites, viruses, and whatnot. If these kill off the queen, or destroy the hive via CCD, e.g., then workers can create a certain limited genetic havoc in the local clade akin to decapitation. But I'd argue that pathology is a different case; since workers don't have sex lives^‡, they can't push forward an adaptive generation.

*Confederate States of America, i.e.

^‡Ignoring a peculiar South African honeybee, and those "primitive" bees, if any, that have never heard the rule. Mere parthenogenesis counts as hive pathology.

Drone Bees: Wandering Minstrels of the Clade

Yep, male bees, the archetypal Utilitarian definition of a useless load on a productive economy.^* But Nature seldom (or never) makes a long-lasting mistake, so if you are a Darwinian evolutionist (like yours truly), you gotta axe yourself, what are we missing here? E. B. White suggested ecstasy but the bees know it goes deeper than that. Bear in mind, bees have been around since the mid-Cretaceous (140-150 million years ago), so we may suspect that most features of their social behavior have successfully withstood an immensity of Time. That includes drones!

Modern apiculture has gone out of its way to reduce, minimize and preferably eliminate altogether the random genetic contribution of casual, footloose drones^† — exempting only those sacrificial domesticated males absolutely required by commerce for artificially inseminating queen bees. The upshot is, half the genetic component of all commercial beehives in North America is a weak, disease-prone, self-incestuous clade ideally suited, at best, for the fumble-fingered bee breeder's laboratory in Florida or Georgia. Not Iowa, not Minnesota, not Phoenix or Billings.

But evolution is a mysterious spirit which expresses the yin, not the yang. The gaps, the niches in the ecosystem are more important than the plastic DNA which fills them in. By snipping the genetic feedback loop between commercial honeybees and their peculiar local conditions — a catastrophic apiculturalist's foulup affecting only drones, since nectar and pollen gathering worker bees are not sexually active, whilst queens are artificially inseminated — what you get is a dangerous dance on a razor's edge. The "niche" may deform and get even sharper around the edges! Ignore change, and a tightly focussed, ruined or non-resilient species can quickly vanish.

Far from useless, drone bees are the hive's wandering minstrels in tune with the local ecosystem. Robust drones are the genetic vector that has allowed "killer bees" to spread from California to Florida, and from Brazil to Texas in less than 35 years, for example — and small wonder, since drones are the way honeybees adapt to changing conditions. So, for example, the answer to Colony Collapse Disorder^‡ may very well turn out to be more drones per hive per decade, not less!

^&DaggerJust supposing all this time, bee breeders have been selecting for an attenuated effeminate drone that smells like a queen bee. Voila! Come spring, the drones do their droney thing and breeze out of the hive to visit the romantic liason corners of the local environment, while unbeknownst, a few myriads of confused workers, smelling their queen and laboring under the delusion that the hive is swarming, follow the drones to oblivion. Of course, this scenario only works if CCD happens after the first drone brood of the Spring matures — there are no drones in overwintering hives (and no drones in commercial hive starter packages, either, for that matter!)

^†Actually, if you search the literature, there's been a lot of research on the short-term question whether artificial insemination degrades or improves the honeybee, mostly wrong ;-)

^*Sure, this might seem like a retirement rant, but bear with me here...

More bees...

Five Ways to Help Our Disappearing Bees is another green website with helpful ways to (hopefully) combat CCD.

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What's with Obama? Labor Day is TEN DAYS AWAY, but he's still giving his old primary election stump speech! It's embarassing. I declared for Joe Biden back in the January caucus, but I'd understand if Joe doesn't want to go down with Obama's toy boat.