Originally Posted by
Eric McArthur
Hi Rosie
Drones average 1,156,850 spermatozoa of which only some 3-4% appears to be migrate to the spermatheca. This reduces the viable sperm to some 35 – 46000 sperm /drone packet. Queen mating with perhaps 17 drone accumulates circa 6 000 000 - 8 000 000 which tallies quite well with Koeniger et al
As one would expect, the number of sperm in the spermatheca decreases significantly over time as the queen utilizes her stored semen to fertilize her eggs. Al-Lawati et al. (2009) found that, on average, one-year-old queens contained only 38%, and two-year-old queens only 21% of the sperm found in freshly mated queens.
The total number of spermatozoa extracted from the spermatheca of a freshly mated queen varies between one to eight million (Koeniger and Koeniger 2000, Cobey 2007).
But you knew this already!
Eric
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