Vagina MuseumOLD THREAD REPOST on virgin birth (also including exploding penises and regicide)
It's time for the bees and the bees talk. This is everything you need to know about where baby bees come from.
For the purpose of this thread, we're going to be talking about western honey bees, because these are best-studied, but many of these principles also apply to other bees. Also ants. Another note before we get going, whenever we say "the queen" in this thread, we're talking about a queen bee. We don't want to get locked up in the Tower, so we thought we'd be clear.
So the first thing you need to know about bees is they have either two or three sexes depending on how you're choosing to define sex.
We'll start with the males because they're pretty straightforward to explain. Take a look at them, they're bigger than bees you'll usually see, stocky, and have huge eyes. They don't have stings. They're called drones because they make a droning noise.
Image credit: Waugsberg, 2007
You don't see drones around very often, because they have only one job, which is to have sex. They can't even eat on their own.
Drones have one set of chromosomes, which come from one parent, a queen bee.
jojoeffe@vagina_museum @Ask_aubry this reminds me of that guy from the other day :)