America suddenly has a record number of bees. What happened to colony collapse?

[getagrip_already]

43. you laugh... but it's girls gone wild every spring

A queen will mate only once in her life during a short window, but will do so with up to 25 drones.

She will fly out of her colony as a virgin accompanied by workers who will guide her part of the way to what's called a drone congregation area. It's an area in the sky, maybe 1500 feet up, that drones pick for whatever reason to collect and hang out.

The queens will find that location and their pheromones will attract males that are most dissimilar in genetics to them to mate in flight. The males will die in the process.

The queen, laden with the sperm of her conquests in a special sack called a spermatheca, will return to her colony and begin to lay eggs using the stored sperm for the rest of her life. Once that sperm runs out, she can only produce male eggs (drones), and the colony would die if they didn't replace her ahead of time.

The drones can only stay aloft for about 30 minutes in the dcg's, which are typically a long flight away from their colony's. They will make multiple flights in a day, arriving near death back at a colony begging for food, in order to turn around and head out again. They are far from the lazy bastards they are made out to be.

They are single minded sex missiles. They don't even have stingers to defend themselves. Once the season is over, the workers will drive them out of the colony to die a heartless death in the weeds. They can't feed themselves or collect their own food. Such is the life of a sex missile. Succeed and die, or fail and die.