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Writer's picturemadmysha

Are queen bees the only female in the colony?

Don't you just love bees? I know I do! (Obviously if you're allergic, I'm sorry, but I hope you can appreciate them from afar. Oh ya, and you can curse a female bee if you get stung, they're the only one with stingers!) And bees are so important. I'm the person who goes out of my way to try and save any bee I can if I find them in a pool, struggling on the hot pavement or something else.


When a bee landed on my windshield I was trying to warn "her" it wasn't a safe place and "she" should find a flower to pollenate. Then I stopped and wondered, is it a "she"? Could it even be a "she"? Are the queens the only female in the colony?! To Google I go. and according to askabiologist.asu.edu worker bees and queen bees are female and the only males are the drones.


Go figure, the females do all the work and the only thing the males do is go off to 'spread the colony's genetics'. So, yes, the bee on my windshield was female. I know this because I took a pretty good look at her and her eyes didn't not take up her whole head. That's how you can tell a drone form a worker. Drones have larger eyes which almost cover their full head. Worker bees have smaller eyes, and you can tell them apart from the queen because they have shorter bodies.


Interesting side fact, bees are actually the first animals to invent air conditioning. They use evaporative cooling and their wings to pump air in and out of the nest to maintain their ideal temperature. Super cool, you know, just like the bees themselves;)







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