Spending his time knocking back nectar, the life of a male bee may seem appealing – but his aerial exploits outside the hive can lead to seriously damaging consequences, as Bill Anderson explains

As the demijohns of Idle beekeepers begin to bloop from the fermentation of the rinsings of their recently harvested honeycomb, anticipation of delicious mead brewed from nectar the bees rendered down to honey can lead to febrile thoughts. Could there be any truth to the myths of ancient Greece that claimed this “nectar of the Gods” possessed magical virtues, conferring immortality on anyone who drank it?

The most assiduous drinkers of nectar are male honeybees. They don’t drink anything else, and they don’t waste any valuable drinking time going out to collect the sweet liquid from blossoms near and far – they let the female “worker” bees fly nonstop three-mile return trips to gather drops of nectar and bring them safely back so the males can lounge and effortlessly booze in the warm snug of the hive.

These lucky layabouts are called “drones” – not necessarily because life in a pub has made their conversation repetitive and boring, but because being bigger and heavier than the females, their wings buzz at a lower frequency and slightly louder to give them lift. But why would drones comfortably ensconced in a pub even need wings?

To get to the next pub! Drones are welcome in every hive – they can just fly in, drink as much as they like for free, and go off to the next one – what a pub crawl! And between hives they can hang out with their mates in Drone Congregation Areas – places in the sky where they buzz around for the hell of it like boy racers, hoping for sex: this is where the virgin queens come to mate. Reeking of swooningly attractive pheromones, these females will fly upwards as fast as they can through the clouds of congregated drones so only the strongest and swiftest males can catch up to mate with them on the wing. And it’s in the moment when a successful drone delivers his genetic cargo into a virgin queen that he indeed achieves a kind of immortality – his DNA will continue into future generations – but the speeding queen will then snap off his massive phallus to make way for her to mate with the next drone in the chase, and none of the fathers of her children will survive this insult to their maleness.

But all the drones who are unlucky in love have the consolation of being able to return to the pub with their penises intact, their thirst, and quenching nectar, undiminished.

Until autumn. When the female worker bees start making some stark calculations about dwindling blossoms, the need for any remaining nectar to be distilled down to honey for survival through the winter, and shrinking supplies of proteinaceous pollen which mean food is short and sex is off the menu. The boys are now a burden. It’s chucking-out time at the pub. Workers literally drag drones out of the hive and stop them coming back in.

Disgruntled males fly off to the nearest pub, only to discover it’s chucking-out time there too. No booze at the inn. Party’s over – nothing personal, it’s just the time of the Drone Slaughter.

So in addition to the mead, other immortality and longevity elixirs are highly recommended.

This article appears in the current edition of the Idler.

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