Queen Bees explained! Well one explanation.

I used to be an after dinner speaker, a free meal and a couple of glasses of wine to talk on a subject you were familiar with. Bees were always a good subject, and I wrote a short story on the subject. The following extract goes in a light hearted way to explain what happens on the arrival of a new Queen.

Extract Monica could not believe she had said it. ‘How interesting, you keep bees. I would love to see them.’ It had seemed an innocent enough comment. She had thought how rugged, how sort of out of doors he looked. And she didn’t expect something you say when striking up a conversation to be taken literally. She just hadn’t thought a singles bar was the place you would meet a bee keeper. Bees, well they really scared the life out of her and she lived in central London, she was safe!

‘Really, I’m surprised all the women I meet seem to be terrified of bees. Well their lovely and they rarely sting anybody,’ Frank positively glowed with pleasure as he regaled Monica with stories of the ladies in his life. Monica on the other hand was not sure she had said the right thing but kept smiling, He really was good looking and she did fancy him.

‘I’m not sure if I’ve got this right,’ she said. ‘Up to seventy thousand female bees in one miniature skyscraper and only a few hundred men, and the men are saving themselves for just one of them, this queen one. Well isn’t she the lucky one.’ The world thought Monica is just simply unjust, some girls have all the luck and the rest of us get very short shrift.

‘You do have a funny way of looking at things.’ Frank said. ‘Actually there is more than one queen, they raise several for mating, but the first one out of her cell goes around killing all the others.’

‘Well that’s the giddy limit, several hundred men. …’

Frank stopped her in mid sentence. ‘Drones, they’re called drones.’

‘I don’t care what they’re called, she got several hundred men just saving themselves for the queens and she wants the lot. No question of fair shares for all, I mean you already have seventy thousand frustrated females in this skyscraper …’

‘Hive, it’s called a hive and they’re not frustrated.’

‘How do you know? Anyway let’s forget about them, what about the new Queens who thought they were on a promise, now this murderous old biddy is going round giving them a hatchet job, just when they thought they were on to a good thing.’ Monica was warming to the subject, she had always thought the world was unjust and there weren’t enough men to go around, at least not the good looking ones. Now here was one man she really fancied and he was hell bent on warping Mother Nature and encouraging the birds and the bees to join in the one sided approach to relationships.

FIN

‘Well that was one approach to the subject, and I liked it.’ Oh! And the Lucky Drones? They died after mating.