Fictional usage of "drone" to mean "worker" in the context of a eusocial species

Solution 1:

This could be a case of object abstraction in linguistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(linguistics)

"Object abstraction, or simply abstraction, is a concept wherein terms for objects become used for more abstract concepts, which in some languages develop into further abstractions such as verbs and grammatical words (grammaticalisation). Abstraction is common in human language, though it manifests in different ways for different languages."

In this case the original description refers to a biological drone, which as you indicate appears to be in the case of bees, a male whose only purpose is to reproduce. This male bee has an apparent "boring"(?!) task but it is done from hive to hive, it is not static.

I think there was a conflation in recent times of "drone" and "worker bee" to indicate humans performing repetitive, tedious, menial or meaningless tasks within a powerful hive-like modern society ruled by the "elite". Obviously the parallels between modern urban transportation systems and bee colonies and activities helped!

(I have to credit Jon Rappoport on a Jeff Rense show... he refers to this w.r.t. the word "reject" which he says came from the literal Latin word for throwing back a spear. This was then abstracted to indicate "throwing back" something you don't like, or something else which was not physical nor a weapon of sorts.)