Honey bees are the only insect which can be instrumentally inseminated.

Honey bees are the only insect which can be instrumentally inseminated. The technique is over 50 years old. It is the only reliable way that the mating of queen bees can be controlled for breeding purposes. Normally a queen will mate in flight with 10 to 20 random drones high in the air and up to several miles away from their home colony.

Today honey bee breeders have selected disease resistant lines of bee, with traits such as Varroa Sensitive Hygiene, or VSH. This trait allows the bees to thrive without chemical treatments by using the bees' own behavior to keep Varroa mites from reproducing. This achievment in bee breeding was only possible with the use of instrumental insemination.

In the above photos, Tom Glenn is collecting the semen from a drone bee, then inseminating a virgin queen with the collected semen from many drones. The process is very humane towards the queen, as she is put to sleep with carbon dioxide during the procedure. She wakes up in a few minutes and within days she is getting on with her job of laying her own weight in eggs every day, about 2,000 eggs. About five million sperm to fertilize all these eggs is stored in an organ called a spermatheca. The sperm stay alive for years until they are used, 5 to 10 at a time when each egg is layed.