Re-Vision the Drone

The Drone bee is a very special part of the hive. Nurtured by their sisters, the drone’s existence is focused on the masculine side of the procreative. They will live during the summer and be shooed out of the hive when there is illness, a nectar or food shortage and at the onset of winter. Most conventional beekeepers enjoy making little jokes about the uselessness of the Drone as they do not do any of the standard duties of the worker bee. Instead the Drone is treated in a very tender way for the two or three months they fulfill their duties for and on the behalf of the colon(ies.) The drone is fed royal jelly for 5 days instead of the standard 3 for the workers. They spend more time in the cell with a longer pupation and therefore greater food and space needs than their sister bees. Conventional beekeepers often try to limit drone production in a hive, traditionally because it was assumed that the Drone would provide a resource drain and use stores for survival that might affect honey volume. This is untrue and it has been found that bees make drones when they are healthy; there is more food in a Hive when drones are around and, most importantly, the morale of the bees seems to be boosted when drones are present leading some beekeepers to introduce drone brood to a hive that seems lackluster.

So what do drones that benefit the hive?

Drones do provide some help in the hive that can be very useful. Their duties within the workings of the Hive are primarily trumpeter and brood warmer and hive cooler. They use their husky voices as alarms when they act as guards. But these wonderful attributes provide little clue into their true, very sacred purpose in the life cycle of a hive

Although, in the wonderfully collaborative efforts and famous of the hive (pollination, honey and wax) are only marginally supported by the Drone, their purpose in the hive is deeply metaphorically Sacred and a possible inroad into a re-framing of the Divine Masculine.

Consider the fact that the drone is 100% the genetics of a Queen Bee, since the drone is created from an unfertilized egg and is therefore the product of the queen’s genetics alone.

(Parthenogenesis.) This miracle alone is worthy of deep meditation and study and is, indeed the framework for a great many Goddesses mythos. When I look at this wonderful reality it makes me think that the Drone’s role is exalted, because the hive is producing the best and brightest, and most bee-loved bee both in celebration of the Divine Masculine and his role in spreading the seed of his Queen Mother.

Besides being a genetic reflection of his Queen mother, each of the drone’s ten million sperm are also 100% her genetics. Let that blow your mind for a minute….

When the drone releases as many sperm as he can in his mate on the wing, his seed becomes the possible vehicle for hundreds of thousands of daughters, each one for the first three days of her egg-dom, capable of becoming a queen. This is the great success of the honeybee, and the Drone is essential for this possibility. Through the seed of the drone, the Queen Bee can ensure survival of her genetics beyond the creation of the few queens that the hive creates. The new queens carry the genes of two parents so their mother’s genetic lineage is diluted.

With the drone offspring, she sends out a pure reflection of herself, embodied as the most nurtured bee in the Hive and all male.