You're born from an unfertilized egg. You hatch, a larvae, and your older sisters began to feed you royal jelly from their heads for your first few days of life. They cut you off immediately, because you of all the brood will certainly never grow to become a queen. You're a drone, and even upon your birth your caretakers sense your limited worth within the hive. Still, knowing what lies ahead for you, they continue to feed you nectar, diluted honey, and pollen as the milk of your childhood until at last, you cocoon. As you make your change, you dream about your mother, somewhere within the hive. Distant and unmindful of you, she's laying more eggs from the sperm of your father, dead somewhere, and that of a handful of other mates.
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You wake up with wings. Around you, the nest buzzes with the movement of tens of thousands of workers. Your sterile sisters, that worker/warrior caste, continue to keep the hive alive. They will feed you on demand throughout your life, you being unable to fulfill even that simplest of tasks. They move within their lives from tending the storage cells, to raising the young, and then taking to foraging in their old age. They toil until the muscles in their wings stop working, shutting down after a biological countdown, bound to one day leave them stranded and helpless on the ground during some random trip home from a final flower. They work until they die, but their lives are not yours. You're different, your genetics resolute in your life's one purpose.
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On some random afternoon, in the midst of Spring, you gather with your drone brothers away from the hive as you do daily. You lap up cool water from tiny droplets on the ground after a rainstorm, all of you a collective outsider within the hive. Each of you is your brother's competition, with only one one-hundredth of you ever bound to mate, but you are still united in your long waiting for what is to come.
At night, as the hive sleeps, you regard your home. You were born without a stinger, and you will never have a chance to defend what is yours. If it were up to you, the colony might be ripped apart by unkind hands, the defenseless young spilling out into the dark, already starving from your lack of care. A chill runs through you, and you shiver in the night. Around you, your drone brothers shiver too, joining the other thousands of workers who are already doing the same. The heat from all your bodies warms the hive, and you fall asleep, united with your kind as one life in the world.
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It's vicious war as the virgin queens emerge from their cells. They have a battle cry all their own, peeping a call of dominance to let each other know that there can be only one victor. They seek each other out and sting each other to death, crawling through the cells of the brood in a mad scramble to find each other first. They pull their still cocooned rivals from their pods, not showing one measure of mercy. You and your drone brothers leave the hive to its unpleasantness, and when you return that evening, there are only two queens left in the hive: the young virgin slayer of all rivals, and the old matriarch, your mother, still laying her eggs. When the time is right, when your mother has outlived her ability to rule, this young female will replace her. The workers will come to the old queen, one by one, until they have covered her completely, and they will gently smother her with their body heat, the subjects bearing away their old monarch with their love.
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Your time has come. At long last, the virgin queen is taking to her nuptial flights. You and the other males are ready to fulfill your one purpose. The queen is off, buzzing in the open air outside the hive. Your drone eyes, huge and now serving their true purpose of spotting the young queen in flight, take it all in. And you're off. No longer useless, no longer a weight on the heart of the hive, you buzz triumphantly after her, that savage virgin who murdered a dozen of her sisters for the chance she's offering to you right now. Rising past a wave of your brothers, you find her and catch her and at last serve the glorious point of your existence.
You merge with her, passing on the genetic code that has made you a champion above your fellow drones. Your seed will mix with that of the other mates she takes on before she settles to egg laying, assuring an even stronger future generation of brood. Your work complete, your barbed sex organ tears away from your body, like the stingers of your sisters, and your insides rush out of the sudden hole within you.
Sex is your doom, but you will never know the shame of those other drones who will be forced from the hive that winter, sentenced to freeze rather than act as a drain on the colony's toughest months. You die, and as it happens you think one last time of your mother, and how you have claimed her successor this day. Your death comes as your queen's will surely arrive; upon the warm dark of familiar wings.
-BLH/2006
Image: Mark L. Winston. 1987. The Biology of the Honey Bee
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