Recovery Partition

On a Mac, does the recovery partition get overwritten EACH time you wipe the drive OR upgrade the OS? For example, I have a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard. If I want to reinstall the SL, obviously, I will use that OS to perform the installation. Most likely, I will use either the DVDs or recovery partition to perform the installation.

Lets say, I wipe the drive and I perform a fresh install of Lion or Mavericks OR I perform an upgrade to Lion or some other OS version. Does the recovery partition which get overwritten with a newer OS X?