• Rakonat@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wow they screwed that all up.

    Drones do not take care of the young. At all. Literally all the drones do is eat and roam the hive until breeding season, then they get it on and die alone since their hive won’t let them return after they copulated, and if there ever become too many drones the workers chase them out and kill them if they try to return. Different species do it a bit differently but in general the drones are the first to be culled if resources ever get low. The only major exception is if a hive lost their queen, some workers can lay unfertilized eggs which develop into male drones to pass on the genetic diversity of the hive, as they anticipate dying out without a queen and no eggs young and healthy enough to rear new ones.

    • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Drones die after mating, as the act of mating kills them. It’s not the hive rejecting them.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)

      The process of ejaculation is explosive—semen is blasted through the queen’s sting chamber and into the oviduct. The process is sometimes audible to the human ear, akin to a “popping” sound. The ejaculation is so powerful that it ruptures the endophallus, disconnecting the drone from the queen. The bulb of the endophallus is broken off inside of the queen during mating—so drones mate only once, and die shortly after.