Honeybees pollinate a lot of our food crops, they’re welcome visitors to our gardens and they are widely kept throughout the world – so much so that some have described them as a domesticated species. It may come as a bit of a surprise, then, to discover there are big gaps in our knowledge regarding where honeybees mate. The problem is that bees mate in mid-air, possibly up to 50 metres above the ground, where it’s almost impossible to observe them. This is why my colleagues and I spent two years trying to track the flight paths of male honeybees, known as drones. We’ve published the results in a new study which helps solve the longstanding mystery of where honeybees mate.
Origen: We tracked male honeybees for two years to find out where they look for sex
