16 May 2020

Cape bees and asexual reproduction

To follow up my earlier post https://mellifera.blogspot.com/ some more news on Cape bees (Apis mellifera capensis).

In the photo, the Q has the 64 marker disk; right next to her is a 'super worker' bee.



What makes it unique is that the female worker bees are able to lay eggs that develop into other female bees. These eggs are not fertilised by a male (worker bees are unable to mate), so this is a form of asexual reproduction, known as ‘thelytoky’. The Cape bees are essentially creating a clone.
Cape bees only develop this ability once the colony’s queen bee dies. By producing female bees, they can give birth to the colony’s new queen, ensuring that the colony survives. In other honey bee subspecies, the worker bees only produce male bees (drones), which have to fly off in search of a queen bee in another colony.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/virgin-birth-gene-identified-in-honeybees/

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