you can call me queen bee

October 5, 2021 11:54 PM

More Than Honey - "In 2013 Markus Imhoof used mini-helicopters and high-speed cameras to capture an extraordinary video of the inflight mating of a queen bee. The ejaculation of a drone bee is so powerful that his endophallus ruptures and he quickly dies." [full video] (via)
posted by kliuless (29 comments total)

PornHive
posted by chavenet at 1:02 AM on October 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

Paging Slim Harpo...
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:38 AM on October 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

NSFH (Not Safe For Hives)
posted by nickggully at 4:57 AM on October 6, 2021

It's the life of a drone bee: honey, nut, cheerio.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:06 AM on October 6, 2021 [119 favorites]

This is way better than a book I recall in elementary school that described bee reproduction as flying high into the air and getting married.
posted by dr_dank at 5:33 AM on October 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

I know there’s the whole dying part afterwards for the drone, but can you imagine having sex while flying? That’s gotta be intense.

Also, that footage is ridiculous. How on earth could they catch that moment?
posted by umbú at 5:39 AM on October 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was once told that the detached organ stayed with the queen and served the evolutionary purpose of corking her up to prevent a subsequent mating. So he's dying to preserve his lineage.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:54 AM on October 6, 2021

Sadly, the footage does not record the drone getting any high-fives en route to the ground.
posted by Mr. Excellent at 6:09 AM on October 6, 2021 [9 favorites]

He got a hive-high beforehand.
posted by Wet Spot at 6:12 AM on October 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

Also, that footage is ridiculous. How on earth could they catch that moment?

It was... probably not on the first try.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:29 AM on October 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

All this Queen Bee talk is making me want to watch the Quiet Storm Remix video again.
posted by GamblingBlues at 6:42 AM on October 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've mentioned Drone Congregation Areas before, but the tl;dr of them is that queens will fly some distance away from their colony to avoid interbreeding with their own drones. Drones, for their part, reliably/persistently return to certain areas for breeding, and queens will just as reliably locate these areas.

What continues to stump scientists is: how?

How are these areas chosen, and how do the males and females find them year after year? Some sort of visual cue? Geomagnetic-field related? These are tiny creatures crossing vast distances (relative to their size) that nevertheless find each other every year, and nobody knows how in the hell it happens. Queens don't have more than one mating session in their lives, and the males don't live long enough in any event to pass on the information to the next generation of drones.
posted by jquinby at 7:11 AM on October 6, 2021 [17 favorites]

The bees are neat. I also want to know more about the camera rig.

(I'm a tad skeptical that the shot of the bee dropping to the ground was the same bee filmed at the same time. But, it's effective.)
posted by eotvos at 7:17 AM on October 6, 2021

I read the FPP in Seinfeld's voice.
posted by srboisvert at 7:29 AM on October 6, 2021

Fly united.
posted by cenoxo at 7:35 AM on October 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's amazing to me that she can keep flying, carry him along with her, survive the explosive ejaculation, and still get the pangram.

PEAFOWL? Really??
posted by The Bellman at 7:52 AM on October 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

@jquinby:

How are these areas chosen, and how do the males and females find them year after year?

You answer yourself: the areas are not "chosen" and the bees do not "find them year after year." They are areas where the bees are disposed to go, presumably based on some knowledge that is built into their bodies, and the only "finding" is that after wandering around until they arrive, the bees know "this is the place." Which leaves open the question "What knowledge exactly?" And also the question "what fraction of bees don't find the mating grounds?"
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:02 AM on October 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

Two bee or not two bee.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 8:10 AM on October 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

…that footage is ridiculous. How on earth could they catch that moment?

There’s some production details in a Cineuropa interview with More Than Honey director Markus Imhoof, 8/20/2012:

How were you able to film such intense close-ups of the bees?
For the macro shots, we set up a bee studio in Vienna with 15 bee colonies of different races. We needed ten crew members to film a single bee. For these macro shots, we used the digital high speed camera Phantom HD [*], which can shoot 300 frames per second so that we could show the movement of the bees. The problem with slow motion is that it requires a lot of light. Of course, we didn‘t want to burn the bees nor to let the wax melt. Therefore, we shot a lot of the scenes outside and worked with mirrors that reflected the light without producing too much heat.

Was it difficult to find a team that was willing to work with bees?
The crew had to come with certain skills - one was to take time, because the film was made over the course of two years. We had 70 documentary shooting days and 35 days for the macro shots in the studio. The macro shots were taken by Attila Boa, who was already experienced in filming bees and had built an ocular in the mask of his protective suit. The documentary part was filmed by Jörg Jeshel. One of his firsts tasks was to film the killer bees in Arizona, which attacked his nose straight away.

*The exact Phantom camera wasn’t specified (and is probably discontinued), but here’s their current line.
posted by cenoxo at 8:58 AM on October 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I took Beekeeping in college and the best class was about the mating. When the DCA (Drone Congregation Area) first came up, jquinby, I pictured a barbershop littered with old dog-eared issues of Sports Illustrated and empty beer cans, an unwatched TV in the background with an announcer giving the play-by-play.
posted by Rash at 8:58 AM on October 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

The Drone Congregation Area is just the lounge of Bertie Wooster’s club…
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:54 AM on October 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

I wonder what this will do to the birds & bees talk for kids...

"You see, when a man and a woman want to have a baby they congregate anonymously at a big party in a far away place and then the man's penis explodes and he drops to the ground and dies and that's how you ended up in mommy's belly. Any questions?"
posted by Hairy Lobster at 11:40 AM on October 6, 2021 [6 favorites]

Surely you mean a bay-bee?
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:42 PM on October 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

Could we sidebar DirtyOldTown's joke at the top of the thread? I flagged it as 'fantastic' but I just want to say it deserves far far more recognition.

Outstanding effort.
posted by awfurby at 3:54 PM on October 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

Touché, DOT. Short, fast quips are the best.
posted by cenoxo at 9:15 PM on October 6, 2021

While I have full faith and confidence in DOT’s comedic muse, it should be noted there is a certain amount of prior art .
posted by zamboni at 9:46 PM on October 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

Closeup of the end result* (or if you prefer, the resulting end). I’m never eating Cheerios again.

*Tip of the sourcing hat to Twitter commenter robolieus.
posted by cenoxo at 6:41 AM on October 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Awfurby: Sadly, that joke has been all over my facebook page for the last couple of months. It’s cute though!
posted by SLC Mom at 9:23 AM on October 7, 2021

More about More Than Honey from director Markus Imhoof:

My goal wasn’t to shoot a global film that would go at top speed from one place to the next, but rather to take the time to get to know and understand the different protagonists – most of them, beekeepers. All of them expressed their personal opinions. Even if they inspire or suggest a number of broader themes, we mainly sought to get to know them as human beings. We observed their daily work, took their existential anguish quite seriously and suffered with them when yet another bee colony disappeared or had to be destroyed.

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.” – Albert Einstein. He probably didn’t say this, but it’s not far off the mark:

On Einstein, Bees, and Survival of the Human Race – An invitational editorial first appearing in the newsletter of the British Bee Keepers Association, Keith S. Delaplane, Professor, Dept. Entomology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA

posted by cenoxo at 11:55 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]