The Male Honeybee, or Drone

Male honey bees are called drones. Although they are larger than worker bees, they are still considerably smaller than the queen. There aren't many of them in any given hive--only 200 or 300 compared to up to 30,000 workers. They don't do much, either. They don't, for example, build comb, forage for nectar or pollen, or feed the grubs. For that matter, they aren't even capable of feeding themselves for the first few days of their lives; worker bees must tend them as solicitously as they tend the legless, helpless grubs. They have no stingers and therefore cannot defend the colony against its enemies. About the only contribution to society that drones make is that they inseminate or fertilize the queen. After approximately twenty-four days of development (three days longer than a worker and over a week longer than a queen), drones emerge from their pupation chambers. They receive food from workers for about a week, after which they begin to make short forays out of the hive to scope out the neighborhood. With time, these flights, which usually occur around the middle of the afternoon, get longer and take the drones further from the hive (up to two miles or more). Drones in search of a queen will opportunistically pursue almost anything that flies by, even birds or other inscets. When they finally spot a virgin queen on a nuptial (mating) flight, they take off in pursuit, using her sex pheromone as a guide. A swarm can quickly form behind a queen in flight, often consisting of 100 or more anxious males; these swarms are called drone comets, due to their resemblance to the celestial bodies.

The queen can mate with half a dozen or more males on her nuptial flight, which may involve several forays, but she will never mate again after the completion of her nuptial flight and return to the hive. Queens are known to store sperm for up to seven years. From the drones' point of view, mating is a mixed blessing. The act of copulation, while undoubtedly something for males to do to pass the time, is not only violent, it is actually lethal to the male--he "literally explodes [his] internal genitalia into the genital chamber of the queen and then quickly dies" (Wilson, 1971)
~Bugs in the System, May R. Berenbaum, 1995