The Birds and the Bees

For your enlightenment, Isabella Roselini explains it all, in a bee costume.  

I don't know how to format the video to make it bigger, so you might just want to watch it on YouTube.

She isn't quite right about part of it--the male bees, called drones, don't just mate with any female.  They only mate with the queens.  A female bee doesn't become a queen by being mated with--she's sterile.  Ms. Roselini does say this, but then she also says that the bee will become a queen, so it's kind of confusing.   To be clear, bees only become queens during their larval phase, when the nurse bees feed them royal jelly.

Bees have sex mid-flight. The queen can have sex with up to 17 drones, and her virgin flight only happens once.  She collects all that sperm in her body and keeps it there for the rest of her life. 

The drone's penis is actually called an endophallus, but the queen bee's vagina is only called a vagina.
The drone bee's penis explodes when he orgasms, and the tip actually stays in the queen and acts as a plug so the semen doesn't come out. 

Here's a picture of a dead drone with his schlong all blown out.

And did you know that you can artificially inseminate a queen bee?  Yes.  Really.  And there are *pictures*.  I saw them in Earl's gigantic bee book.  You hold her vagina open with tongs and somehow you get the mail-order bee sperm inside her. 


Thanks to Samuel for suggesting that I cover this topic and for pointing me to Isabella Roselini's film :-)

Here are some links for further reading.



http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0701.htm

http://insects.about.com/od/antsbeeswasps/qt/Honey-Bee-Mating.htm

http://www.vegetus.org/honey/art.htm