There is More to the Birds & Bees Story Than We’ve Been Told
Sex is just a tiny part of it.
The mental picture I got after learning that a male bee’s testicles explode after mating is a hard one for me to get out of my mind. If that isn’t bad enough, its penis and intestines are pulled straight out of its body following its sexual encounter with the queen bee.
It gives a whole new meaning to the expression, Take one for the hive. Reportedly, the queen’s boudoir is littered with male bee bodies following her love-making episodes.
Face it, the idea of exploding balls is horrifying, even if they belong to a bee. So what was Mother Nature thinking? Was it simply her way of capping off the climax with a big bang? But here is the real capper: the penis remains in the queen, acting as a genital plug to prevent impregnation by other drones, keeping the genes from being mixed up before she lays between 1,500 to 3,000 fertile eggs per day.
During the first two weeks of her life, she makes several mating flights. She mates in midair on these flights with anywhere from one to more than 40 drones. The queen stores the semen from these mating flights for the remainder of her two-to-three-year life. This video from More than Honey shows the queen’s mating flight.