Sometimes a column will take a radical turn, thanks to an accident of research.

For example, this week’s piece on drones.

Inspired by Amazon.com’s recent public relations coup, a video of a package being delivered from warehouse to homeowner’s patio by a GPS-guided mini-helicopter, I set out to write about the future of drones.

As with any new technology, there are a lot of details to work out. Pessimists imagine a sky full of government robot spies hovering outside bedroom windows; optimists envision a brand new high-tech industry, transforming everything from oil exploration to pizza delivery.

Say what you like about drones: they’re coming. The Federal Aviation Administration is actively developing safety guidelines for their commercial and recreational use.

In fact, drones have already entered the sphere of the hobbyist. For about $1200, you can buy a drone equipped with all the electronics necessary to fly far beyond your range of sight; loiter autonomously over a pre-determined spot; and shoot about twenty minutes of high-definition video before returning, like a faithful dog, to the launch site. Video which, by the way, is wirelessly streamed back to your cell phone in real-time, giving you the experience of gliding over distant treetops — and perhaps private residences — like a stealthy bird of prey.

I’ll admit that I’ve been tempted to try one out myself. What homeowner wouldn’t want to be able to buzz around his property, inspecting the flashing on the chimney one minute, dive bombing the occasional unsuspecting groundhog the next?

The future of drones is troubling and exciting — in other words, ripe for a column — but just as I was studying up on the history of the word “drone,” I came across something even more amazing: the sex life of bees.

“Drone” has a lot of negative connotations: a bagpipe’s loud, buzzing monotone; the sound of a lethally boring teacher; a soulless, sexless cog in some vast social enterprise.

But the origin of the word is beautifully simple. A drone is a male bee; specifically, the bee that fertilizes the queen’s eggs. The drone’s role in the hive is very narrowly defined. He’s not a typical worker. He doesn’t gather nectar, nurse babies, or build a honeycomb. He was born for love, and love only.

The drone hatches from a very rare unfertilized egg laid by a worker bee. Fewer than 1% of worker bees are equipped to lay eggs; only a handful of drones are born for every ten thousand ordinary females.

The point about the unfertilized egg is especially interesting. This means that the drone has a mother, but no father. It also means that a drone can never have a son, since all of his offspring will be the product of fertilized eggs — assuming his quest for a queen is successful — and thus be female.

But in a twist worthy of ancient Greek drama, the fatherless and sonless drone actually has a grandfather, and possibly even a grandson!

This generation-skipping dance of fatherless males is called “haplodiploid sex-determination,” and it’s a common feature of all bees, ants, and wasps. The males of the Hymenoptera order of insects are genetically challenged; they only have one set of chromosomes, as opposed to the females, which have two sets.

But apparently one set is enough to create a drone that is physically larger than most of the worker bees; has bigger eyes for better mate-spotting in mid-flight; has beefed up wings that can keep up with fast-flying queens; and, strangest of all, has an incredibly specialized inflatable male organ.

(Warning: the following description is sexually graphic, and might not be suitable for younger readers. Also, it’s pretty gross. And possibly traumatic, if you happen to be a dude.)

Most of the time, you’ll find a drone lazing around the hive, but in the right season, he’ll slip away to a so-called “congregation area” — the insect equivalent of an airborne singles club — and loiter, waiting patiently for a queen and doing his best to avoid confronting the other lustful suitors who have thrown their hats into the ring.

The arrival of a so-called “virgin queen” triggers a hormonal stampede. The drones swarm after her, causing an effect called a “drone comet.”

One lucky drone is the winner — although “lucky” may be overstating the case, once you know how it all ends. The drone lands on the queen’s back, grabs hold with all six legs, and then contracts his abdomen, which, in a miracle of micro-hydraulics, inflates his surprisingly large sex organ.

This is described in the literature as “everting his endophallus into the queen’s open sting chamber,” which goes to show you that even highly technical scientific writing can still manage to sound filthy.

The drone, now on the verge of achieving his life’s highest purpose, discovers, presumably to his dismay, that he’s paralyzed. Within five seconds, the total duration of the tryst, his energies converge in a literally explosive climax, which occurs with such force that it can sometimes be heard on the ground as a faint “pop!”

Then, like the spent booster stage of a rocket, the body of the drone separates from his male organ and falls from the sky. Death will come soon to our hapless drone, whose private parts are already en route back to the hive, safely tucked away in the queen’s ruthless sting chamber.

What can I say? I told you the bees were more interesting.