Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #541

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Bees Are Explosively Ejaculating To Death During Heat Waves
By Aly Laube
What’s black and yellow and ejacu- lates until it dies during heat waves? Male bees, it turns out, and scientists — disturbed as they may be — have a solution.
When the males get too hot, they convulse until they explosively ejaculate to death, and a phal- lus the size of their abdomen bursts from their lifeless body.
Yes, it is disgust- ing and upsetting. But we can fix it, UBC experts say.
One solution is to keep the hives cool during extreme heat,
perhaps by using a polystyrene cover. Dr. Alison McAfee and Emily Huxter conducted the research, with Armstrong-based beekeeper Huxter on the ground and McAfee con- ducting analysis remotely.
McAfee is a post- doctoral fellow at UBC and North Carolina State University. She’s a biochemist who specializes in honeybee fertility.
“We actually don’t know why that happened,” said McAfee, about the drones ejacu- lating post- mortem.
“What we do know is that the sole purpose of
the male bees, as far as we under- stand so far, is to mate with a virgin queen, and they don’t really con- tribute to the hive in other ways. Their only job is to, when they’re sexually mature, fly and find the congregation area where all the other boys go and find the Queen and chase her in mid-air.”
They always die after they mate, but the ejection of a phallus from their abdomen is unusual.
“They actually contain a whole phallus internally, and when they mate, their abdominal mus- cles contract very
strongly. The same thing hap- pens when they die due to stress for reasons that we don’t know, and that forces the endo-phallus to appear outside their body,” she explained.
“That’s sort of a partial version,” she continued, about the protru- sion. “That’s actu- ally only half the structure.”
When Huxter reached out to her about the project, McAfee found the drone deaths very con- cerning.
Their two-inch polystyrene cov- ers cooled the hives by about four degrees — enough to keep the creatures alive, hopefully.
But McAfee wor- ries the film won’t cool the centre of the hive, where the queen lives. That’s why she wants to give drones syrup as well as poly- styrene, so they can carry liquid into the hot, dense core.
The polystyrene
alone is probably enough to prevent “at least some colonies” from dying, but it’s like- ly to only work with the smaller ones that are eas- ier to cool.
Scientists know that about 50% of male bees, or drones, will die after six hours at 42°C. BC got that hot this past sum- mer, leaving a dent in local bee populations, and it could happen again in 2022.
But still, McAfee says why this happened is “a total mystery.” There’s more research to be done, and she intends to carry on with her work alongside Huxter.
Eventually, she plans to look at the temperature in different parts of the colony, instead of gaging the area right under the lid.
“I’ve been study- ing the effects of heat on the sur- vival and fertility of bees for a few years now, and I always thought it was more of an issue for bees
that get too hot when they’re being shipped from one province or country to another because it’s a very unnatu- ral environment,” said McAfee.
“It makes me think about other insects as well.”
Bees work in teams to keep each other alive, but solo bugs don’t have that protection.
“Seeing the heat very obviously affecting honey- bees makes me think it’s very like- ly that wild insects and native species are prob- ably also affected as well, so I think that’s a super important area of future research,” she said.
The experiment has not been peer-reviewed, but several bee- keeping experts from UBC have backed its find- ings.
So the drone deaths are not glamorous. But you’ve got to give it to the bees: at least they went out with a bang.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine