The Forgotten Sex: The Importance of Drones for Colony Health

Among the largest threats to colony health is queen failure. Shockingly, as many as 50% of commercial queens fail within 6 months. Beekeeper production relies on high quality queens, so queen failure is of deep importance to beekeepers and researchers alike. While much energy has focused on queen aspects of failure, we are increasingly discovering that drones play a more important role in queen quality than originally expected. Of drones which are sexually mature, as few as one in ten may be able to produce enough sperm to successfully inseminate a queen. If drones are not producing healthy sperm, their mates will not produce healthy colonies. Despite this, we have very little understanding of precisely why drone reproductive quality is low. In this talk, I will discuss drone biology, causes of poor drones, and what beekeepers can do to mitigate poor drone quality.