Virgin Queen Mating Areas and Drone Congregation Areas (DCA's)

by Gerald M. Loper

Drones fly out from their colonies every afternoon (season and weather permitting) in a search for virgin queens. Studies from other parts of the world and the United States conducted in the 1960's-1970's discovered that drones congregate in specific aerial locations day after day and year after year. These DCA's are of various sizes but often about 100m in diameter and, in these areas, they will fly higher (up to 60m) than the 12-20m elevation they fly as they leave the apiary or fly between DCA's. Beginning in 1985, we used a modified radar with a rotating parabolic dish to track the drones and to locate DCA's.

This picture shows the radar screen in which a large DCA was observed. First, at the top of the picture, from left to right, the numbers indicate that the year was (19)89, on the 89th day. The next numbers indicate that it was 3:01 MST. Just below the time is the angular elevation of the radar beam above the horizontal. Inside the circles, the center is where the radar is located, the first circle is a radius of 463 meters and the outer circle has a radius of 926 meters. Thus a large area, or actually a volume of space was being "viewed" every 2 seconds (dish rotation rate). All the dots inside the circles, are insects, in this case drone honey bees. As you can see, many drones are congregated in a particular area (the drones in this view were between 40-50m above ground) about 100m wide and 200m long. Actually, the drones in this picture are seen as a "slice" through the middle of the DCA. Even more drones were seen at the 4o and 5o "slices" and the top of the DCA was seen in the 7.1o "slice" topping out at 60m above ground. By moving the radar and making such observations, we found 28 such DCA's and documented the interconnecting flyways between them.

These studies are written in the paper "Honey bee drone flyways and congregation areas, radar observations", 1992 in Jr. Kansas Entomological Society, 65:223-230 written by G.M. Loper, W.W. Wolf, and O.R. Taylor, Jr.

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