Wealden Times | WT265 | June 2024 | Education Supplement inside

Jane Howard sheds some
light on the complex
hierarchy of a bee colony
I’ve been keeping bees for about twenty years
and in all that time I never knew that DCAs
(Drone Congregation Areas) existed. But having
just been to a fascinating talk about them (life in the
fast lane at Coopers) I came away, yet again, with
one of those 'isn’t nature amazing' feelings. (I bet not
one of you reading this knows what a DCA is, but
read on and be equally astonished and impressed.)
So first a little bit of bee background. During the
summer months a colony of bees is made up of one
queen, up to 50,000 worker bees (all female) and a
couple of hundred drones (male). The
worker bees, as their name suggests, are
the ones who go out all day, visiting
flowers to collect nectar which gets
brought back to the hive to be made
into honey. The queen is there to lay
eggs. When the colony needs a new
queen they feed one of the eggs royal
jelly and after 16 days it emerges as
a virgin queen bee. The old queen
then leaves the colony (that’s what
makes a swarm) and the new queen
will make a single flight, up above the tree line. Once
there she will mate with several drones (who in the
act lose their genitals and fall to the ground and die
shortly after) leaving the queen with enough sperm
to lay at least half a million eggs in the years ahead.
Well that’s the tale you get spun at bee school, but
introduce DCAs into to mix and it’s sooo much more
interesting. For your average male bee I always imagined
life was pretty dull – get born in the spring, spend every
day flying up above the tree line waiting for that virgin
to pass by. If you get lucky it's terminal and if you don’t
you just keep up the daily routine, up down, up down,
When the colony needs
a new queen they
feed one of the eggs
royal jelly and after
16 days it emerges as
a virgin queen bee
till the autumn comes along and the workers kick you
out of the hive to meet a rather cold and lonely end.
But actually, no need to feel sorry for them at all:
it’s like one summer-long pub crawl. A typical DCA
is between 30 and 200 metres in diameter, about 30
metres above ground. Drones can pick and choose
which ones to visit, travelling, if the mood takes them,
over 7km to a favourite one, or visit several in the
same day. And they don’t all come
from the same colony, they come from
all over the place – from up to 240
different colonies in one case – so
plenty to chat about while waiting
for the all important to fly past.
And just so the girls can find
them, once in the DCA they all
make a particular sound, a bit like
whistling I suppose, to advertise
their location. No research has
been carried out yet to investigate
what queens are looking for in a good DCA; in
fact do they actively choose one over another?
Now I expect you are wondering how the learned
bee people know so much about them? First they
have to find them. To do so they put virgin queens
in tiny cages tied to balloons (if, like me, you're old
enough to remember the Nimble bread ads, you’ll
be getting the picture), then they let the balloons
go up tied to a very long piece of string and, if they
end up in a DCA, bingo – lots of interest. If not,
they bring her back down and try another spot.
Who would’ve known. Half anyone?
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