During the mating season, honeybee drones make mating trips to congregation areas where they face fierce competition to mate with a queen. Drones have developed distinct anatomical and functional features to optimize their chances of success. In order to investigate whether drones have also developed distinct flight behaviors, a study was conducted to monitor flight activities of western honeybee (Apis mellifera) drones and foragers using radio frequency identification (RFID). Several previously unrecognized findings were revealed in this study. Drone flight durations showed a bimodal distribution, whereby flights can be divided into short flights and long flights, while forager flight durations showed a left-skewed unimodal distribution. Interestingly, the short flights of the drones occurred prior to the long flights on a daily basis. The first trips of the day that the drones made were primarily short trips, but the distribution significantly shifted towards long trips in the second flights, and by the third flights of the day, the flights were primarily long trips. In contrast, forager flights showed no such shift of distribution. In addition, drones made only short flights but no long mating flights on days associated with a significant drop in temperature and increase of clouds compared to the previous day. These findings suggest that drones may have developed a unique flight behavior making short flights first to evaluate the weather conditions before flying out to the congregation area to pursue a successful mating.
