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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

The queen bee is a formidable final boss with a bad-ass origin story.

She's also her daughters' slave. They make her work (lay eggs). They decide when to make new queens. They decide when to swarm with the old queen, and when they do they put her on a diet first so she can lose weight so she can fly (they won't let her eat much for two weeks), and they'll push her out of the hive when the time comes.

Humans only really get stung by queen honeybees when manipulating them. Normally the queen will be inside the hive and stay inside the hive except once or twice early in her life when she goes out to mate.

Why does she go out to mate? Aren't the drones in the hive?

Maybe for the same reason we don't marry our cousins? :)

I think two answers, though as per TFA there's probably a lot more behind this:

First, she wants to get the best genetic material, and flying high is one of those tests for drones to pass, and

Second, needs to acquire genetic material from different bloodlines, hence does the business with several drones (obviously not an option within the hive).

The drones in the hive are her brothers. She needs more gentic diversity, so she goes out to mate with other colonies' drones. Her attendants know where to go find them because they've scouted them before.

The drones are also clones (?) of the prior queen. They are unfertilized eggs, so they contain a genetic copy of half the queen's DNA. Mating with a drone from you hive would be like mating directly with your genetic mother. It's going to result in real bad inbreeding real quickly. Especially since queens mate a single time, and live for only a few years.

They're like half-clones, yeah. Queens can mate more than once though, but usually just once, and if more than once just twice. A well-mated queen will have sperm from a dozen different drones.

Ahh, thank you, I thought she mated with her own drones and was wondering how they got any genetic diversity like that.

it's a Game of Drones

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