July 19, 2022, 9:12 AM
July 19, 2022, 9:12 AM
A study by Canadian scientists shows that male bees, or dronesare dying a horrible and quite unusual death during severe heat waves, expelling their endophallus, or internal penis, from their body.
According to a Canadian study, conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canadathe extreme heat, resulting from climate change, forces the drones, the male bees, to “spontaneously ejaculate” due to thermal stress, thus causing death.
They expel an “internal penis equivalent,” or endophallus, as a result of the shock of approaching heat death. “They have this elaborate endophallus that sticks out and is about the size of their own abdomen. It’s pretty extreme,” explained study author Dr. Alison McAfee, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories.
In the midst of the 2021 summer heat wave, Emily Huxter, a rural beekeeper in the Okanagan Valley province began noticing dozens of dead drones on the ground. She took photos and emailed them to the researcher, who contacted other beekeepers. These said they had witnessed the same disturbing phenomenon, which according to them endangered the survival of their colonies.
“We know that after six hours at 42 degrees, half of the drones will die from heat stress. The most sensitive ones start to perish within two or three hours,” McAfee said, noting that this is a temperature they “shouldn’t normally experience.”
For bees to withstand heat waves, the researchers suggested several clues. Among them, putting a polystyrene cover over the hives to help cool them by absorbing the sun’s heat, thus facilitating thermoregulation. A test carried out on several hives showed that the Styrofoam-enhanced hives were cooler by about 3.75 degrees Celsius than the control ones.
The second method of cooling was to provide the colony with a feeder filled with sugar syrup. “Bees will naturally fetch water to bring back to the hive and fan their wings to cool off, which achieves evaporative cooling, similar to what we do when we sweat. Giving them syrup close by should allow them to do the same, and the sugar it contains motivates them to lower it faster,” McAfee explained. The researchers found that hives that had syrup “air conditioning” were cooler by 1.1 degrees Celsius.
McAfee said it will conduct more experiments to help protect these essential pollinators from sweltering summer temperatures. The phenomenon made it possible to realize that male bees can be even better indicators of temperature change than queens, the traditional bee finder of the scientific community.
