"Queen Honeybees Keep Harems of Dancing Males"

Who could have guessed just how sexy beekeeping is? No, not our attire in the bee yard, but the activity of the queen. Here's an article we found yesterday:

"Honeybee queens have sex with harems of males apparently to give birth to much better dancers, research reveals.

"The better honeybees dance, the better they are at hustling for chow, scientists add.

"Taking lots of male consorts is a dicey proposition for bee queens. For one thing, it increases their risk of catching sexually transmitted diseases.

"Also, if a queen's children have several fathers, they don't have as much in common with each other genetically speaking, which in theory could threaten how well they all get along.

"Still, polyandry--where females each mate with several males--does happen among honeybees.

"Indeed, North American honeybee queens each have sex with an average of seven to 20 males, with the giant honeybee in Asia known to demand up to 104 mates.

"To see why honeybee queens might prefer a life of promiscuity, researchers compared a trio of queens each inseminated by just one male drone with a trio of queens inseminated by 15 drones.

"The genetically diverse colonies of queens inseminated by 15 males turned out better dancers--they performed more waggle dances and longer dances. Worker bees use waggle dances to reveal where food is to nest mates, and genetically diverse colonies dispatched more foragers to look for food.

" 'What really surprised us was the extent of difference,' researcher Heather Mattila, a honeybee behaviorist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told LiveScience..."

The article continues at: Queen Honeybees Keep Harems of Dancing Males

This is one of the many "waggle dance" videos posted on YouTube:
Honeybee Waggle Dance Experiment