Spermatheca
The organ in which a queen stores sperm from her mating flights for the rest of her life.
Bees
Definition
A queen mates with ten to twenty drones over a few flights in her first fortnight and never mates again. She stores several million sperm in the spermatheca and draws on them for years, fertilising eggs selectively — a fertilised egg becomes a female, an unfertilised one a drone.
See also
Other bees terms
Sources
Sources
- The Biology of the Honey Bee — Harvard University Press (1987) · Textbook
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