Thread by @vagina_museum

Since it's #WorldBeeDay, settle in because we're going to give you the bees and the bees talk. Here's where baby bees come from.

For the purpose of this thread, we're going to be talking about western honey bees, because these are best-studied, but many of these principles also apply to other bees. Also ants.

Another note before we get going, whenever we say "the queen" in this thread, we're talking about a queen bee. We don't want to get locked up in the Tower, so we thought we'd be clear.

So the first thing you need to know about bees is they have either two or three sexes depending on how you're choosing to define sex.

We'll start with the males because they're pretty straightforward to explain. Take a look at them, they're bigger than bees you'll usually see, stocky, and have huge eyes. They don't have stings. They're called drones because they make a droning noise.

You don't see drones around very often, because they have only one job, which is to have sex. They can't even eat on their own.

Drones have one set of chromosomes, which come from one parent, a queen bee.

Queen bees look a little different to regular bees buzzing around in the flowers. They're bigger and have a much longer abdomen. They're also bigger than the males. The queen in this picture has a red mark, because it's domesticated and has been marked by the beekeeper.

Like the drones, the queen's job is all about reproduction. The queen will lay all the eggs in the colony, and be the mother of all or most of the bees in there. You don't see queens very often because they spend almost all their life in the colony.

Queen bees have two sets of chromosomes from two parents, a queen and a drone.

And then we get to the bees you see most of the time. Almost every time you see a bee, it will be one of these, a worker. We've illustrated with a picture. We probably didn't need to. It's a normal bee. In a flower, like bees do.

Worker bees do basically every job in the colony that isn't related to sex or baby-making, because they don't have developed reproductive bits. They regulate temperature, gather food, do the cleaning, raise the larvae, protect the colony. They're busy bees.

Like the queen, workers also have two sets of chromosomes, one from a queen and one from a drone. And they can be genetically identical to the queen, born on the same day and could have been a queen themselves if their childhood had been different.

But despite this, workers are incapable of sex and are almost never capable of laying eggs because they just don't have the junk to do so.

The path to becoming a worker or a queen starts when the bee is three days old, and just a little larva. The colony will only make queens if their current queen is dying or preparing to swarm because they only need the one.

The workers will chose a few larvae and start feeding them a very rich diet, exclusively of royal jelly, and build it a special peanut-shaped container called a queen cell.

The ones who will become workers just eat the normal diet of "bee bread" (yes, bees make bread, too, it's a little pellet of nectar and pollen) and grow up in the basic, ordinary cells.

After feeding the queen larvae the good food, they'll emerge from their cells, and it's time to pick the best queen based on her leadership qualities. The leadership quality bees value most is "ability to murder all of your sisters before they murder you."

The winning queen will kill all of the other potential queens either before they've emerged, or after, by stinging them. But there's one challenge left: the colony won't recognise it as queen until after mating.

Within a fortnight of emerging and killing her sisters, it's sexy time for the queen. She flies out and finds the drones, who are hanging out in a drone congregation area, which is exactly what it sounds like, drones from different colonies flying around waiting to mate.

This is the only time that a queen leaves the colony, to visit the bee fuck-cloud. She'll gather all the sperm she'll ever need at this party.

Remember how we mentioned that drones have huge eyes? That's to help them mate. They need to see what they're doing to successfully shag while flying up to 40 metres above ground.

We're going to talk about penises for a second, because drones have a penis-like organ called an endophallus. It's usually internal but it turns inside out for mating and is inflated by contracting the abdominal muscles.

You can have little a picture of bee penis, as a treat.

Anyway, during mating, which lasts five seconds max and usually more like two, the drone grasps the queen with all of its legs, then puts the endophallus into the queen's sting chamber and ejaculates explosively.

You can sometimes hear bee ejaculation from the ground, it makes a popping noise.

So forceful is bee ejaculation, the drone's dick pops clean off and the drone is thrown backwards and paralysed. It will die from this, as it loses a lot of its guts, which is why you don't usually see drones around.

The queen mates with up to 15 drones at the party, each one having to remove its predecessor's discarded dong. The queen now has all of the sperm it will need for the rest of its life, and stores it in an organ called a spermatheca.

The spermatheca (sometimes called the receptaculum seminis, which literally means "semen receptacle" is for storing and releasing sperm, and can hold up to six million sperm which the queen will release when it needs to fertilise an egg.

We would love to show you a picture of a queen's spermatheca, like we could with a bee penis, but as always, it's hard to get hold of pictures of internal reproductive organs and science is, in general, just way less interested in studying vaginas.

After her day out mating, the queen goes back to the colony, and she can start the business of laying eggs, unless the old queen hasn't died yet. In that case, first on the agenda is to kill the old queen, either by stinging, or workers balling around it to overheat it to death.

The queen is able to choose whether to make a drone, by laying an unfertilised egg, or whether to make a worker (or perhaps a queen who will one day supercede her if she's getting on a bit) by laying a fertilised egg.

For the rest of its life, the queen lays eggs, up to 1,500 a day in spring. The childcare is then immediately outsourced to the workers, of whom it can make more, any time it wants.

This time of year is prime time to see queens and drones, as well as the friendly workers poking their dear little faces into flowers. Bees tend to mate in May or June, so look out for weird-looking bees, and know what they've been getting up to.

Image credits:
Drone: Waugsberg, 2007
Queen: Courtesy of Insect Images
Worker: Ivar Leidus, 2009
Drone dick pic: Michael L. Smith, 2012