Regret the Error

A television review last Saturday about “Silence of the Bees,” on PBS, misstated the cause of death of a honeybee colony’s males and also included imprecise references to other aspects of hive life. The males, called drones, die after mating or are driven out of the colony by the females and die of exposure; they are not worked to death. (The females do the work.) The life span of the males can range from two or three weeks to nearly two months or more; their life span is not always limited to 30 days. The number of males in a colony can be in the hundreds or more; a colony is not limited to 100. At the height of the nectar-gathering season, colonies can include 50,000 bees or more; thus a queen can be attended by more than 30,000 subjects, not just 30,000. Link