We often hear that the competition for an opportunity to mate with a queen bee weeds out unfit drones. Evidently, drones can be carriers of disease and still mate successfully, thus transmitting viruses to the queen and her resultant colony:

> There was no significant difference in mean endophallus DWV [deformed wing virus] titre between drones captured in DCAs [drone congregation areas] and their genetic siblings collected from the same mater- nal hives. This suggests that DWV infection of drone genitalia has no apparent effect on drone mating flight performance over a very wide range of DWV titres. As a result, the endophalli of the drones found in our European DCAs were frequently infected with high titres of DWV. Secondly, there was enormous variation in the DWV titre found in the endophalli of individual drones from the same colony, with further significant differences between individ- ual colonies within the recruitment area of a particular DCA. There is also highly significant variation in these DWV titres between different geographic regions.

> The most important implication of these findings is that sexual DWV transmission is likely to occur naturally in honey bees, in the same way that it occurs by artificial insemina- tion (Yue et al. 2007; de Miranda and Fries 2008) and that DWV is seemingly able to develop to relatively high titres in the drone endophallus (up to 100 million to 1billion copies/endophallus) apparently without adverse effects for drone flight performance. The high endophallus DWV infection rate itself suggests that venereal transmission is a major transmission route for DWV, which may in part explain the wide distribution of DWV in Europe. -- Deformed wing virus and drone mating flights in the honey bee (Apis mellifera): implications for sexual transmission of a major honey bee virus.  Apidologie Online First™, 5 August 2011

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