A successful male is a dead male. A failure lives to stagger home and beg to be fed and to try again tomorrow. After a week or so of lekking, that’s it. The drone is deemed a drain, and if he won’t die for love, he must die for its lack. “The workers will start withholding food, the male gets weakened, and at some point the workers will grasp him and dump him out of the hive,” said Gene E. Robinson, who studies bees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.