Page 82 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

80 THE MIRACLE OF THE HONEYBEE

The Male Bees’ Inevitable End
The queen and the male generally meet at high altitudes. The males are
unable to approach the queen at lower than 4.5 meters (14.76 feet). During
mating, part of the males’ reproductive organs, including the sperm sac,
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rupture, and as soon as mating is completed, the male bee dies. Neither
do the other males who fail to mate with the queen have much longer to
live. Males live only in spring and early summer, after which they are
killed by the workers. Once the time of the mating flight is over—and as
the nectar levels in flowers start to decline in the heat of summer—the
workers’ behavior towards the males changes completely. Although the
workers look after the males very carefully during the mating period,
once that period is over, they start to tear off the drones’ wings and attack
them. If the males try to eat anything, the workers seize them in their pow-
erful mouths and drag them by their antennae or legs to the hive entrance
and throw them out.
Expelled in this way, the males soon die of hunger, since they lack the
ability to find food for themselves. Therefore, they make determined ef-
forts to re-enter the hive. Yet again they face the bites and poisoned stings
of the workers. Although the drones are larger than the workers, they are
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unable to withstand this attack. Following the expulsion of the males
from the hive, the females—both workers and the queen—spend a long
time in the hive, until spring the following year, on their own.
Now, consider the situation of the male bees in the light of evolutionist
claims. As just described, the males die shortly after their mating. This is
one form of behavior that evolutionists cannot explain. The way that the
drone risks death and embarks on the mating flight for the hive’s benefit is
behavior totally at odds with the concept of the “struggle for survival.” If
the mechanisms that evolution claims to exist in nature really did so, then
the males should long since have undergone an evolutionary process that
worked more in their favor. Yet for millions of years, male bees have been
embarking on mating flights that will lead to their deaths.
In short, it is impossible to account for this example of self-sacrifice