While ‘natural beekeepers’ are utilized to pondering a honeybee colony more with regards to its intrinsic value to the natural world than its capacity to produce honey for human use, conventional beekeepers along with the public at large less complicated more likely to associate honeybees with honey. It has been the main cause of the interest directed at Apis mellifera because we began our association with them just a couple thousand years ago.

Quite simply, I suspect a lot of people – when they consider it at all – often create a honeybee colony as ‘a living system that produces honey’.

Prior to that first meeting between humans and honeybees, these adaptable insects had flowering plants and the natural world largely to themselves – more or less the odd dinosaur – as well as over a length of tens of millions of years had evolved alongside flowering plants along selected those that provided the very best quality and amount of pollen and nectar for their use. We could assume that less productive flowers became extinct, save for individuals who adapted to presenting the wind, instead of insects, to spread their genes.

It really is those years – perhaps 130 million by some counts – the honeybee continuously developed into the highly efficient, extraordinarily adaptable, colony-dwelling creature that people see and talk with today. By means of a number of behavioural adaptations, she ensured a top a higher level genetic diversity within the Apis genus, among the propensity in the queen to mate at a ways from her hive, at flying speed and at some height through the ground, with a dozen or so male bees, which have themselves travelled considerable distances using their own colonies. Multiple mating with strangers from another country assures a degree of heterosis – important to the vigour of the species – and carries a unique mechanism of choice for the drones involved: only the stronger, fitter drones are you getting to mate.

A rare feature with the honeybee, which adds a species-strengthening edge against your competitors towards the reproductive mechanism, is that the male bee – the drone – is born from an unfertilized egg by the process generally known as parthenogenesis. Which means that the drones are haploid, i.e. only have one set of chromosomes produced from their mother. Therefore means that, in evolutionary terms, the queen’s biological imperative of passing on her genes to generations to come is expressed in her own genetic purchase of her drones – remembering that her workers cannot reproduce and so are thus an inherited dead end.

And so the suggestion I created to the conference was that a biologically and logically legitimate way of about the honeybee colony is as ‘a living system for creating fertile, healthy drones for the purpose of perpetuating the species by spreading the genes of the best quality queens’.

Considering this style of the honeybee colony provides an entirely different perspective, when compared with the typical point of view. We could now see nectar, honey and pollen simply as fuels because of this system along with the worker bees as servicing the needs of the queen and performing every one of the tasks needed to ensure the smooth running with the colony, to the ultimate reason for producing good quality drones, that will carry the genes of the mother to virgin queens business colonies far away. We are able to speculate regarding the biological triggers that cause drones to get raised at certain times and evicted or even killed off at other times. We can easily look at the mechanisms that may control facts drones being a area of the complete population and dictate how many other functions that they’ve within the hive. We can imagine how drones seem to be capable of finding their approach to ‘congregation areas’, where they appear to gather when looking forward to virgin queens to pass by, after they themselves rarely survive greater than a couple of months and rarely with the winter. There is much that we still do not know and may even never fully understand.

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