The Drone Bee Part 2
The Drone Bee Part 2
It has long been known that drone honeybees are most numerous in the summer. It was also recognised very early, that these same drones are then ejected out of the hive at the onset of winter. Their main purpose is to mate with queen bees (at which point they die) but there is evidence also that they are useful for maintaining the temperature of the colony. In part one, I looked at a few metaphors for drones in popular culture which described them as lazy, greedy, and pompous. I also touched on ancient thoughts by looking at Aristotle and Pliny, who both described drones in much the same way. In part two we shall move forward to the thirteenth century and then onwards to the present day.
Medieval knowledge about drones
Thought and knowledge in medieval Europe have often been mistakenly argued to be pretty poor. The term ‘dark ages’ has largely fallen out of favour with historians, but its naming of this era still pollutes our thoughts about it. Even the term medieval conjures up an idea of an era that is primitive and unintelligent. That is not really the case. Historians now see that there was much development in this period. There were discoveries and improvements. These came much slower than they do now, but then we live in unprecedented times in that respect. Things have sped up.
One of the leading experts in the thirteenth century was a man called Albertus Magnus (c.1200-1280). Albert was a German Dominican friar, but he also studied philosophy and natural history. He learned about Aristotle whilst studying at the University of Padua and this proved crucial to the development of his thoughts over the rest of the century. Indeed, Albert is best known for commenting on virtually all of Aristotle’s surviving writings, bringing knowledge of the ancient philosopher to a much wider audience and even including thoughts and ideas that had developed in Muslim territories.
Writing in the thirteenth century, Albertus Magnus drew on Aristotle to understand what drones are and what their purpose might be. One theory that he puts forward, based on Aristotle’s description, is that drones ‘are like them [bees] in species, but different in sex’. As part of this theory, Magnus is clear that drones are male and that, in being so, they are called by many as ‘masters’ of the hive and that ‘they are not assigned menial tasks in the swarms for they carry neither honey or wax’. This is not exactly what Aristotle had said. Aristotle was unsure of the sex of the drones but did view them as almost another species in themselves, which comes out in Albert’s description.
There is not much more about drones in Albert’s writings, but nonetheless his identification of them as male was to prove important in eventually identifying the sex of all the bees in the hive.
Early Modern Drones
Moving forward to the end of the sixteenth century, various texts described drones as lazy and useless, but also, importantly as male, following on from the arguments that Albert had made centuries earlier.
William Shakespeare, for instance, included drones in his plays. In the Second Part of King Henry IV, Act 1 Scene 2 he describes drones as ‘the lazy yawning drone’. Around the same time William Harrison (in Holinshed’s Chronicles) describes the Danes who had invaded as similar to drone bees. The native English, he claimed, was made to ‘become their drudges and slaves’ while they ‘sat at home and fed like drone bees of the sweet of their travel and labours’.
The same allusion is used by Harrison when describing University students whose studies continue for decades:
‘For after this time & 40 years of age, the most part of students do commonly give over their wonted diligence & live like drone bees on the fat of colleges, withholding better wits from the possession of their places & yet doing little good in their own vocation & calling’.
Not everyone pushed the allusion to laziness though. Edmund Southerne, who wrote his treatise on beekeeping in 1593, defended the drones as they ‘do both help to work into Combs, and also to unload the Bees of their burdens so that their work within is as necessary as the others abroad’. His predecessor in writing about honeybees, Thomas Hill (who published his beekeeping treatise in 1568), was similarly skeptical about the drones being useless. He calls them ‘unperfect Bees’, following Virgil, but then describes them as ‘heavy of body’ and ‘slow in doing their business’, but they do work and contribute to the hive. Hill’s description is one where the drone works, but uncomfortably, and are often driven out of the hive because they do not work well enough.
The most famous early beekeeping handbook was published in 1609 by Charles Butler. This book is generally described as the first scientific handbook on beekeeping, but in reality, it is something of a halfway house between the old traditions and the new scientific observations. Butler’s The Feminine Monarchy, most famously recognised the leader bee as a Queen, but on the topic of drones he had this to say:
The Drone, which is a gross hive-bee without sting, hath been always reputed for a sluggard, & that worthily for howsoever he brave it with his round velvet cap, his side gown, his great paunch, and his lowd voice, yet is he but an idle person living by the sweat of others brows. For he works not at all, either at home or abroad, and yet spends as much as two labourers; you shall never find his maw without a good drop of the purest nectar.
There is a ring of Laline Paull’s aristocratic bee in this description (see part one of this essay). However, as with his predecessors, Butler finds a use for the drone bee by recognising their maleness and thus their vital role in reproduction:
For albeit he be not seen to ingender [take part in intercourse] with the honey-bee, either abroad, as other insecta do, or within the hive, where yet you maybe means behold what they do; yet without doubt is he the male-bee, by whose natural heat and masculine virtue the honey bee, which breeds both honeybees & drones, secretly conceives.
It took a long time for the role of drones to be understood, mainly because there was a lack of understanding and mystery around the process of reproduction in the hive, but also because there was a tendency in pre-modern Europe to view the honeybee colony as a microcosm of the perfect state. The Queen Bee was often described as male because to do otherwise would break the picture of a King at the top. The drones were often described as military commanders, sometimes male but sometimes female, but their apparent laziness made this a difficult claim to sustain. It appears to have been common knowledge that the drones were lazy bees, ejected from the hive at the end of the season, so often they were shown to be the lazy labourers, who deserved death for failing the commonwealth.
What was not known, or even suspected, was the truth of the matter. Drones mate with virgin queen bees in the air, in places called Drone Congregation Areas. Essentially, drones from various hives join in specific locations and young unmated queens find these areas. Up to twenty drones will then mate with her. Those who are unsuccessful leave after 30 minutes or so. They will, however, try again. The discovery of the Drone Congregation Area, however, would have to wait until more recent times. For most of history, humans have wondered at the mysteriousness of bee reproduction and questioned what point the drone has in a hive.
References
Butler, Charles, The Feminine Monarchie (London, 1609).
Chew, Kristina (trans.), Virgil Georgics (Indianapolis, 2002).
Cresswell, Richard (trans.), Aristotle’s History of Animals in Ten Books (George Bells & Sons: London, 1902).
Harrison, William, Holinshed’s Chronicles (London, 1587), vol. 1.
Hill, Thomas, “A Profitable Instruction of the Perfite Ordering of Bees”, in The Profitable Arte of Gardening (London, 1568).
Kitchell, K. F., & Resnick, I.M., Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica (The John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1999), vol. 1.
Paull, Laline, The Bees: A Novel (Harper Collins, 2014).
Shakespeare, William, Second Part of King Henry IV, Act 1 Scene 2
Southerne, Edmund, A Treatise concerning the right use and ordering of Bees (London, 1593).