- Extreme heat is very bad for male honeybees
- Apparently when the temperature reaches 107.6° Fahrenheit honeybees ejaculate themselves to death.
Ejaculating themselves to Death
According to Metro, scientific research reveals Honeybees can literally ejaculate themselves to death in extreme heat.
When male worker bees encounter very high temperatures their bodies begin to convulse, which forces them to ejaculate their abdomen-sized penises-equivalent out of their body and die from the shock.
To a casual onlooker it may look like the bee spontaneously exploded, but new research has shown there to be a bizarre sexual component to this final act.
Bees try to maintain a body temperature of 35°C/95°F, and if things get as hot as 42°C/107.6°F then half of the drones will die within six hours.
Extreme Heat Warning
An extreme heat warning is in effect from Sunday to Tuesday, with the UK potentially recording its highest ever temperature.
With immense heatwaves rocking Europe, scientists are looking at developing new ways to cool them down and prevent deaths from heat exhaustion.
Dr. Alison McAffee, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories focusing on bee health, said:
‘When drones die from shock, they spontaneously ejaculate. They have this elaborate endophallus that comes out and is about the size of their own abdomen. It’s pretty extreme.’
Beehives typically maintain a temperature of around 35°C/95°F and although the Columbian bees should have been able to cope with the temperature, the excess heat ended up killing off many of them.
‘We know that after six hours at 42°C/107.6°F, half of drones will die of heat stress,’ Dr McAfee said.
“The more sensitive ones start to perish at two, or three hours. That’s a temperature they shouldn’t normally experience, but we were seeing drones getting stressed to the point of death.’
Dr. Alison Mcafee
Preventing Honeybee Deaths due to Heat
After the first ‘drone apocalypse’, Dr McAfee and her team conducted a series of experiments to test hive insulation materials, in order to prevent another wave of mass-deaths during future heatwaves.
Some of these methods included coating beehives in a protective polystyrene cover, which helps cool the hive by up to 3.5°C.
Another method devised by Emily Huxter, a beekeeper involved providing each colony with a feeder full of sugar syrup to act as a bee cooling station.
“Bees will naturally go find water to bring back to the hive and fan it with their wings to cool down, which achieves evaporative cooling much like we do when we sweat
Giving them syrup nearby should let them do the same thing, and the sugar in it motivates them to take it down faster.”
Emily Huxter
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