Honey guide
Male Bees: Drones Evicted Every Autumn
Drones are male bees whose only purpose is mating. They do no work, eat the colony's honey stores, and are evicted and killed by workers every autumn in UK hives.
By Honey Honey Honey · Published 3 June 2026
What is the drone's only purpose in a bee colony?
A drone's sole biological purpose is to mate with a virgin queen from another colony. He contributes nothing to honey production, comb construction, larva care, hive defence, or any other colony function. He exists to carry and deliver genetic material.
This singular focus is reflected in his anatomy. Drones have enormous eyes that cover most of their head — built for detecting the optical profile of a flying queen at distance. Their compound eyes meet at the top of the head, unlike workers whose eyes sit on the sides. This gives drones excellent detection of moving objects against a bright sky, which is how they spot queens on mating flights.
Drones have no pollen baskets on their legs. They have no wax glands. Their mandibles are weak — they cannot manipulate wax or defend themselves. They have no sting. Their tongue is too short for efficient nectar collection. Every structure that workers have for colony tasks is absent or reduced in drones.
Their one specialised organ is the reproductive apparatus. Drone endophallus is everted explosively during mating — a mechanism that takes a fraction of a second and is fatal to the drone. The entire mating act is adapted for maximum sperm transfer in a single event.
In a UK hive, drones appear in spring as the colony builds toward its summer peak, and their population rises through May and June. By August, their numbers begin to fall as workers stop raising new drones and start evicting existing ones. In most UK colonies, drones are absent by October.
The colony raises drones when conditions are right for a new queen to be produced somewhere — either in the colony's own swarm preparation, or because other colonies in the area will be swarming. Drones from many colonies congregate to mate with queens, so raising drones benefits the colony's genes even if the colony's own queen is not replaced.
How are drones different from workers — size, anatomy, behaviour?
Drones are noticeably larger and more barrel-shaped than workers. A drone weighs approximately 230 mg compared to a worker's 100 mg. Their abdomens are blunt and rounded where workers taper to a point. In the hive, they are easy to spot once you know what to look for — larger, slower-moving, and with a distinctive loud buzz.
The flight sound is different because drones have more powerful flight muscles relative to their wing area. A single drone in flight produces a noticeably deeper, louder hum than a worker. Beekeepers sometimes hear drones returning to the hive on warm afternoons, their approach audible from a metre away.
Behaviourally, drones spend most of their time resting on comb, being fed by workers, or flying out to congregation areas in the afternoon. They do not patrol the entrance, fan the hive, or perform any visible colony task. They walk slowly through the colony without the purposeful movement that workers show. Workers largely ignore drones rather than engaging with them, unless the eviction season arrives.
Drones require more food per day than workers because their flight muscles are large and their afternoon flights consume significant energy. A drone performing congregation area flights can consume three to four times as much honey as a resting worker. In a colony with 200–300 drones at peak, this represents a meaningful drain on stores.
On comb, drone brood is visible by the distinctive domed cappings — raised and rounded compared to the flat, smooth cappings over worker brood. Drone cells are larger than worker cells and are typically found in patches on the lower edges or outer areas of the brood frame. The pattern is consistent enough that beekeepers use drone cell location as a reference point for comb orientation.
How do drones find queens to mate with?
Drones fly from their hives on warm afternoons, typically between about 12:00 and 17:00 on days with temperatures above 18–20°C. They navigate to drone congregation areas (DCAs) — specific airspace, usually 10–30 metres above the ground, where drones from multiple colonies aggregate to wait for queens.
DCAs are consistent from year to year. The same aerial locations are used by different drone populations across seasons. What determines a DCA's position is not fully understood, but visual landmarks, ground topography, and possibly magnetic field features all contribute. In the UK, certain hilltops, hedgerow gaps, and field edges are known DCA locations used by beekeepers as predictable mating sites.
When a virgin queen leaves on a mating flight, she flies toward the nearest DCA. Her pheromone cloud — particularly the volatile components of queen mandibular pheromone — disperses into the air and attracts drones. Drones detect the pheromone and converge on her. Mating occurs in flight, at speed. Multiple drones may mate with a single queen in quick succession.
The queen typically mates with 12–20 drones over the course of 1–3 mating flights spanning a few days. She stores the sperm in a specialised organ (the spermatheca) and uses it to fertilise eggs throughout her laying life. The genetic diversity from multiple matings ensures the colony contains workers of varied genotypes, which is thought to improve colony robustness and disease resistance.
Drones that fail to find a queen return to any hive with a low-aggression entrance. Drones are admitted to foreign hives, unlike workers, which is one reason drone congregation promotes genetic mixing between colonies. A drone raised in a hive in Cornwall may mate with a queen from Gloucestershire if both are in range of the same DCA.
What happens to a drone after mating with a queen?
A drone that successfully mates with a queen dies instantly. Mating involves the explosive eversion of the drone's endophallus — the internal reproductive organ turns inside out under hydraulic pressure to transfer a sperm packet into the queen's reproductive tract. The mechanical force of this process ruptures the drone's abdomen. He falls from the queen dead or dying.
The speed and finality is notable even among insect mating systems. The whole event takes approximately one second per drone. The queen may mate with several drones in a single flight, each dying immediately after mating. The queen then returns to the hive, where workers detect she has mated by the mating sign (remnant of the previous drone's endophallus, which she carries until workers remove it).
The drone's death is a consequence of the physical mechanism required for efficient sperm transfer. The explosive eversion achieves rapid, reliable insemination but requires more pressure than the drone's body can sustain. From an evolutionary standpoint, the drone's purpose is fully discharged at the moment of mating — his death at that point has no cost to his gene transmission, which is complete.
The vast majority of drones never mate. Estimates suggest that fewer than 1% of drones produced in any season successfully mate with a queen. The rest either die on flights (from cold, predation, or exhaustion), are evicted before mating season ends, or simply fail to encounter a receptive queen in a DCA.
This low success rate means that each drone is an enormous gamble. The colony invests significantly in each drone (24 days of development, ongoing feeding throughout summer) for a reproductive payoff that most individuals will never achieve. The calculation makes sense because the few successful matings transmit the colony's genes colony-wide through the queens those drones fertilise.
Why do worker bees evict drones every autumn?
Workers evict drones in late summer and autumn because drones have no function in winter and represent a serious drain on honey stores. A colony that maintained drones through winter would burn through reserves faster and risk starvation before spring.
The trigger for eviction is declining nectar flow. As summer nectar sources dry up and day length shortens — typically August to September in the UK — workers stop tolerating drone presence. The behavioural shift is sharp: drones that were ignored in July are actively harassed in August. Workers bite drones, drag them toward the entrance, and block their re-entry if they fly out. On cold mornings, drones evicted the previous evening may be found dead on the landing board, unable to survive overnight without the warmth of the cluster.
In a colony preparing to swarm, workers may maintain drones into late summer as part of swarm preparation, since a new queen resulting from the swarm will need to mate. But even in swarming colonies, drone eviction follows once the new queen is mated and the mating season is over.
The eviction is worker-controlled. The queen has no role in it. Drones cannot resist effectively — they have no sting and are outnumbered by thousands to one. Some try to return to the hive entrance after eviction and are repeatedly repelled until they lack the energy to try again.
In a well-managed UK hive, drone absence by October is a normal sign that the colony is properly preparing for winter. A colony with drones still present in October, especially one producing new drone brood, may have a failing queen — possibly a drone-layer — which is a serious problem requiring investigation and intervention before the season ends.
How many drones are in a healthy colony in summer?
A healthy UK colony at peak summer typically contains 200–500 drones, representing roughly 0.5–1% of the adult population. Some strong colonies maintain 1,000 or more drones in June and early July, particularly in years with good forage conditions.
The number is colony-specific and queen-genetics specific. Some queen lines consistently produce more drone comb and more drones than others. Drone production is also influenced by comb availability — colonies with more drone-sized cells will raise more drones because the queen lays unfertilised eggs in the larger cells automatically.
Beekeepers sometimes manage drone population by inserting drone foundation (comb with larger cells) as a deliberate strategy, or by culling drone comb for varroa management (see the next section). The colony's natural drone-raising impulse can be directed or suppressed through comb management.
The ratio of drones to workers is a point of some contention in beekeeping. From a pure colony production standpoint, drones are a cost. They consume stores and produce no honey. Many commercial beekeepers minimise drone comb and maintain low drone populations. From a genetic diversity standpoint, drones are essential and reducing them too sharply limits mating success.
In a natural setting — feral colonies in tree cavities in British woodland — drone populations are often higher than in managed hives because natural comb contains more drone-sized cells. Comparative studies of managed versus feral colonies show that feral colonies allocate more comb space to drones, suggesting the managed suppression of drones may impose genetic costs that are not fully captured by single-season honey production metrics.
Can a colony produce drones without a queen?
Yes. Workers who have developed into laying workers — which happens 2–3 weeks after a colony becomes queenless — can lay unfertilised eggs. These eggs produce drones. A laying-worker colony produces drone brood in worker-sized cells, creating a scattered, irregular brood pattern that is quite different from a queen's tidy laying pattern.
The laying-worker state is recognised by the irregular brood pattern (multiple eggs per cell, eggs laid on the cell wall rather than the base), and by the fact that capped drone brood appears in worker-sized cells producing a bumpy, irregular surface to the capping.
A laying-worker colony is in a death spiral. It cannot produce worker bees, so its adult worker population shrinks every day. The drones it produces have no role in the colony's recovery. And crucially, laying-worker colonies are typically resistant to accepting a new mated queen — workers are in a partial queen-like hormonal state from their own egg-laying and often ball any introduced queen.
Recovering a laying-worker colony is one of the more challenging tasks in UK beekeeping. Techniques include merging with a queenright colony using the newspaper method, or introducing frames of open brood repeatedly to suppress laying workers before attempting queen introduction. Some beekeepers simply take the practical approach of combining the laying-worker colony with a healthy queenright colony, accepting the loss of the failing unit to strengthen a viable one.
The ability to produce drones without a queen is a last-ditch evolutionary response. Even if the colony cannot survive, the drones it produces may mate with queens from other colonies and transmit some of the original colony's genetics. It is a desperate option, but it means the genes are not completely lost when a colony fails.
Why do some beekeepers remove drone comb as a varroa control?
Varroa destructor, the main parasite of managed honey bees in the UK, has a strong preference for drone brood over worker brood. The varroa mite enters a capped cell just before capping and reproduces inside during the pupal development period. Drone pupae take 24 days to develop, compared to 21 days for workers. This extra 3 days gives varroa mites an additional reproductive cycle — drones emerge from cells carrying more mites per bee than workers do.
Beekeepers exploit this preference by inserting a frame of drone foundation into the brood nest in spring, allowing the colony to build and fill it with drone brood, then removing and freezing or uncapping the capped drone frame just before the drones emerge. This removes the drone pupae along with the varroa mites reproducing inside them.
One round of drone comb removal can reduce the varroa mite population by 15–20% without any chemical treatment. Used consistently through spring and early summer, it delays the point at which mite levels reach economically damaging thresholds. In integrated pest management approaches recommended by the BBKA and the National Bee Unit, drone comb removal is one of several non-chemical methods used alongside monitoring and timed chemical treatments.
The trade-off is clear. Removing drone comb also removes the drones themselves, which are the colony's contribution to the local drone pool and to genetic diversity. In an isolated apiary, systematic removal of all drone brood could reduce local mating diversity. In the UK, where most beekeeping occurs in regions with multiple beekeepers within a few kilometres, the impact on local drone genetics is usually modest. Beekeepers in isolated areas or those specifically breeding for native bee genetics weigh this trade-off more carefully.
Frequently asked questions
- Do drones have stings?
- No. The sting is a modified egg-laying apparatus, and drones do not lay eggs. They are completely harmless to handle.
- How long does it take a drone to develop?
- 24 days from egg to adult — three days longer than a worker (21 days) and four days longer than a queen (16 days). Drone cells are slightly larger than worker cells and have a distinctive domed cap.
- Can a drone from one hive mate with the queen from the same hive?
- Theoretically possible but extremely rare. Drones and queens from the same hive tend to fly from the same location, and the congregation area behaviour means drones typically travel several kilometres from their home hive. There are some mate-avoidance mechanisms, though they are not absolute.
- What is a drone congregation area (DCA)?
- A specific aerial location, typically 10–30 metres above the ground, where drones from multiple colonies gather to wait for virgin queens. DCAs are consistent from year to year — the same spots are used by different colonies across seasons.
- How many times does a queen mate?
- A queen typically mates with 12–20 drones on 1–3 mating flights over a few days. She stores the sperm and uses it to fertilise eggs throughout her laying life, which can span 2–5 years.
- Can worker bees lay eggs?
- Yes — worker bees can develop the ability to lay unfertilised eggs if the colony has been queenless for 2–3 weeks. These unfertilised eggs produce drones only, and a colony of laying workers typically cannot survive without beekeeper intervention.
- Do all bee species have drones?
- All sexually reproducing bee species have males, but the term 'drone' is most commonly used for Apis mellifera. Bumblebee males are sometimes called drones. Solitary bee males vary widely in behaviour but none form colonies.