What is the sex of a drone bee?

The correct answer is that a drone bee is male. Drones are the only male bees in the hive, and their primary role is to mate with a queen during the breeding season. Drones do not participate in foraging or other hive duties, which are primarily carried out by female worker bees. Understanding this distinction is important for grasping the social structure of a bee colony.

Female bees in the hive include both the worker bees and the queen. Worker bees are responsible for gathering food, tending to larvae, and defending the hive, while the queen's main duty is to lay eggs. The presence of both male and female bees with distinct roles highlights the complexity of the hive's ecosystem.

The other options—female, both, and neither—do not accurately describe the biological sex of a drone, further emphasizing the uniqueness of drone bees as the only male individuals within the colony.