While much is known about the remarkable ways that bees pollinate plants and find their way from flower to flower, fewer people know the intricacies of how bees mate.
Each bee species mate in a slightly different way, and while social bees - including honeybees - have the queen bee which gives birth to all the bees in the hive, other bees, such solitary bees, live and procreate in different ways.
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Discover some of the remarkable ways bees mate below.
How do honeybees mate?
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are probably the most well-known of bees - especially given the way humans have used them for honey over thousands of years - but they are by no means the most important of bees. In fact, it is thought that there are around 20,000 species of bee worldwide and the vast majority of these are solitary bees.
Honeybees are social bees, which means they live and work together in hives with the queen bee presiding over the colony, which can get to around 50,000 bees. The queen bee lays eggs that turn into the next generation of bees.
Honeybees usually mate during flight, when the queen is between 6 and 16 days old and she mates with several male bees (or drones) in a mating ritual. Thousands of drones will surround the queen bee - although only around 10-20 actually get to mate with her - and in the mating ritual she will collect around 100 million sperm which is used to immediately fertilise eggs.
During these mating flights - there can be several over the course of a few weeks - the queen collects all the sperm she needs. Millions of sperm are then stored inside the bee, which stays in a good condition for up to four years and is continued to be used for fertilising eggs.
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Do honeybees have a penis?
A honeybee drone's sexual organ is called an endophallus, which is usually tucked within his body. When they mate, it is inserted into the queen bee's sting chamber and when this is over, the endophallus is ripped off. This means mating usually kills the drone and when it is ripped off it can create a popping noise which can be audible to the human ear.
Drones grow from unfertilised eggs created by a queen bee and they have the express purpose of finding a queen on her mating flight and mate with her. They do not usually mate with a queen from their own hive. Fertilized eggs become a worker bee - female - or queen bee and while worker bees can lay eggs, their eggs are not fertilised, so they only produce drones.
When a queen bee uses all the sperm up, or if the queen bee is slowing down, the colony begins raising a new queen by feeding her royal jelly and they smother the current queen to death.
How do bumblebees mate?
Once the queen bumblebee has emerged from winter hibernation and when she has built up her nest, she lays a batch of unfertilised eggs - which become female worker bees. When a new queen bumblebee is ready to mate she flies off to an area where a male bumblebee has left a special pheromone and waits for a suitable male to come along. Although some bumblebees don't bother with pheromones and just hover near a nest until the queen bumblebee is ready to come out.
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Queen bumblebees mostly mate just the once and it happens on the ground and can take anywhere between 10 and 80 minutes. Transfer of sperm only takes around 2 minutes, but the male bee hangs on to be sure he has managed to pass on his genes. Only 1 in 7 male bumblebees usually manage to mate.
Bumblebees are social in spring and summer, and live in a nest created by a queen to raise her offspring with the help of worker bees. If the nest is big enough, the queen starts to lay eggs which will hatch into males and new queens. Males leave the nest to mate with new queens from other colonies and never go back to the nest. They spend their days hanging around on flowers drinking nectar and looking for queens. Then during winter, it is only the queens which survive by hibernating alone underground.
How do solitary bees mate?
Solitary bees make up over 90 per cent of bee species found in Britain. Solitary bees mate in the early days of spring, usually in a single mating which fertilises all the female's eggs at once, and then the male has no involvement in looking after the nest or eggs. A courtship dance can take place with some solitary bees, such as carpenter bees or mason bees, where they dance around the female, hover and even stroke the queen with their antennae. The male bee usually dies fairly quickly after mating.
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The male eggs in a solitary bee's nest are are laid towards the front of the entrance, so they leave the nest first and then wait around for females to emerge. Solitary bees are on the wing for a matter of weeks and it is only the females that collect pollen, while males are there only for mating with.
