In order to keep the bee population high, scientists are studying various aspects of a bee's life - including its sex life.
"We won't starve if honeybees disappear because we'll have wind-pollinated grains, but the variety of our diet and the healthiness of our diet would be negatively impacted, and food would become much more expensive," said University of North Carolina professor and animal behaviorist Stan Schneider, according to The News & Observer in North Carolina.
Schneider's laboratory houses glass-covered hives that contain more than 12,000 honeybees. As it turns out, the bees are a bunch of matchmakers, with the entire group playing cupid. The worker bees choose the queen and the drones who will duck work and who will be her suitors. "Honeybees are a highly social insect, and they live in a very complex society," Schneider said, according to the News & Observer. "Everything honeybees do, they do it as a society."
Drones mate while in the air, so they need strong flight muscles. The drones are dependent on the colony for the development of those muscles. "All of the proteins that they need for developing their flight muscles so they can fly and find virgin queens, they have to get from workers," Schneider said, according to the newspaper.
What Schneider wanted to know is: how does the colony decide which drones to supply and which to ignore?
For his study, Schneider bred large (high-quality) and small (low-quality) drones and introduced them into his colonies.
"We wanted to know: Can workers assess the quality of these males, and do they bias their interactions based on that?" Schneider said, according to the News & Observer.
Workers were initially aggressive toward smaller drones and many were removed from the colony by the worker bees. All of the larger drones were spared, but to Schneider's surprise, some of the smaller drones were not only kept, but given extra attention (perhaps to help them catch up to the larger drones).
"The success of drones influences whether the colony's genetic material is going into the next generation, so workers influence the mating success of them," Schneider said, according to News & Observer.
Schneider is also currently one year deep into a three-year experiment with queen honeybees supplied by North Carolina State professor and apiculturist David Tarpy.
"Workers seem to show a distinct preference for the best possible queen they can find, so they are making these assessments and then working collectively to enhance the survival of certain queens over others," Schneider said, according to the newspaper. "But then that raises the question of how the workers assess the quality of a queen, and that I don't know."
Honeybee population has been declining. The United States has less than 2.5 million honeybees - down from 5 million in the 1940s, according to News & Observer. A study from the Bee Informed Partnership and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports a 23 percent decrease in managed colonies in 2014.
Many scientists blame "colony collapse disorder," which interrupts navigation and prevents bees from finding their home hives. Declining bee population is a huge problem for growers, like California's almond growers. The almond growers in California supply the world with 80 percent of its almond supply. To do that, almond growers depend on 1.6 million honeybee colonies. When the colony numbers dwindle, agriculturists in California have to truck in bees from elsewhere.
"That's why the loss of honeybees is so concerning, because we don't have anything else that pollinates as well as honeybees," Schneider said, according to the News & Observer.
"I guess most people aren't aware of it, but humans have this really unique symbiotic relationship with this insect," he said. "Human civilization is always based on agriculture, and much of our agriculture is based on the honeybee."
