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Why don't drones, whilst in a hive with a virgin queen, attempt to chivvy her out of the hive so she flies and they can mate with her?
I appreciate they will only mate " on the wing" but why don't they encourage her out such that they can get to her before she reaches a DCA? Given that they will mate with a closely-related virgin queen?
I've heard that worker bees will make some attempt to bundle her out when they deem her ready to mate, but that drones don't do this.
I suppose that they are just hard-wired to chase queen pheromone in flight. It's tradition, don't you know?!
It is a good point though. You might imagine that in bees that do apiary vicinity mating (folk claim that for Amm) then drones doing this would be at an advantage and would get to be dad more often. But ... selection can work in mysterious ways ... and perhaps one less mysterious reason is that brother-sister matings in bees are particularly unfit genetically. The new queen will lay too many diploid drone eggs, so such pairings are selected against. They may seldom head sufficiently prosperous colonies to be able to swarm in future.
G.
I was talking about this the other day (hence the question) and the suggestion was that drones will be attracted to, and enter, hives with a newly emerged queen in it. If this is the case, and that drones generally accepted into any hive, and not just their home one, then the drones in residence wouldn't necessarily be siblings to the new queen (I'm assuming that this is all true?)
The only thing I could GUESS at is if there is a combination of in-hive pheremones that stop drones from "bothering" a new queen in the hive - but when the queen leaves to mate then her pheremones aren't in combination with others in the hive, so changing how drones pick it up. I have just made that up though!
Nice questions Anne. Yup, the in-hive pheromone/odour effect makes sense, but it is just a mechanism, like saying that drones only get randy when they are in full flight at 20m up - maybe they need to be in flight for all the mechanics to work. Why should bees be inhibited from mating closer to home and why might selection drive this? Well, I do take your point that the drones in residence may be unrelated to the queen. But perhaps not enough of them are, and so inbreeding depression still has an effect?