Honeybee drones make short trips to potentially survey the weather conditions

Abstract

Abstract During the mating season, honeybee (Hymenoptera: Apidae) drones make mating fights to congregation areas where they face fierce competition to mate with a queen. Drones have developed distinct anatomical and functional features to optimize their chances of success. The flight activities of western honeybee (Apis mellifera) drones and foragers were monitored using radio frequency identification (RFID) to investigate whether drones have also developed distinct flight behaviors. Drone flight durations showed a bimodal distribution, dividing the flights into short trips and long trips, while forager flight durations showed a right-skewed unimodal distribution. Interestingly, the short trips of the drones occurred prior to the long trips on a daily basis. The first trips the drones made each day were primarily the short trips, and the distribution significantly shifted to the long trips as the drones made additional trips. In contrast, the forager trips showed no such shift in distribution. In addition, drones made short trips, but no long mating trips on days where there was a significant drop in temperature and increase in clouds compared with the previous day. These findings suggest that drones may have developed a unique flight behavior, making initial short trips to survey the weather conditions before flying out to the congregation area to pursue a successful mating.